I've found two new search tools that have become regular features of my daily work. One of them, called Soople (www.soople.com), is a site that takes Google data and massages it to add value to the search. Think of it as a front-end for Google, useful on those occasions when you want to do something out of the ordinary and don't have time to dig around for the right commands.

Suppose you want to search a particular Web site by key word. You can do that with Google, but you have to know how to structure the search statement. With Soople, you choose the appropriate search box and type your key words into the one marked "Search within one site or domain." This strategy really helps when you've found a site that's on your topic and you want to filter out all the rest.

And there are numerous searches you can try using Google as mediated through Soople. You can run a search for images and specify file type or size. This is handy for me when I'm trying to locate small, public-domain imagery for use in my Weblog. You can limit your search to particular kinds of documents, such as Word or Excel or PowerPoint, and you can tap Google's powers as a phone directory, a language translator or a handy calculator.

Soople is unaffiliated with Google; its author says he put it together originally as an interface for his computer-shy mother, who hadn't learned the various search syntax options the engine offered. But heck, I follow this stuff daily and I still find Soople indispensable, especially when I'm in a hurry. Highly recommended.

And when you want information fast, consider Answers.com (www.answers.com). This one breaks out of the search paradigm. Instead of offering you a list of links when you give it a search term, it dishes up several screens of information, using hundreds of different data sources such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, directories and glossaries covering as many as a million topics.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because you remember GuruNet, a reference program that popped up similar information at the touch of a key. And indeed, Answers.com is the product of that same Israeli company, which has revised its business model to do away with its subscription fee and pay the bills with advertising. The consumer gets a great service for free.

Suppose I want to know when Fred Astaire was born. I can search Google, get links to Astaire-related Web pages, go to one or more of these and find the information. Or I can type "fred astaire" into Answers.com. What I get are not links but actual content: one short and one much longer biography, an encyclopedia entry (from the Columbia Encyclopedia), an entry from E.D. Hirch's New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, and a lengthy article from the open-source Wikipedia encyclopedia project.

Answers.com doesn't go as deep as you can with a full-bore search engine, but it's not intended to compete with them. Like Soople, it's for the times when you need something now and don't want to spend a lot of time looking. A handy software download lets you Alt-click on any word from within any program, giving you a fast track to the information without even typing the keyword.

I use Answers.com every day for quick dictionary look-ups; one of its references is the fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary. The site also provides thesaurus entries and translations, into numerous languages, of any word you enter.

Both Answers.com and Soople are great timesavers, and both are indicative of the innovation now being applied to Web searching, which seems to be emerging as the hottest area of Internet development.

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.