These past few days I've been doing a lot more internet searching that usual, doing massive searches for references and old (old = 30 years old) research that might relate to mine, and making absolutely sure that I haven't missed anything. One important resource is the citeseer database, for scientific papers, which is truly fantastic, not just because it gives you the papers, but context for the papers, and bibliography references (in BibTeX format!). Aside from that obviously the number one resource is google (what else) but Dylan told me over the weekend a couple of google tips I didn't know. For example, you can use a tilde "~" sign before a keyword or sets of keywords for google to automatically. Furthermore, you can search for, say "~tornado -tornado" to get all the synonyms of "tornado" but not the results for "tornado" itself. How's that for useful? A full list of advanced google tips is here.