Forums are by far the most essential information depository in the net today. Active forums can have ongoing dicussions practically 24 7, making them a treasure spot for your content research. It is also beneficial in a way that content is usually presented in a Q&A way, giving way for you to attack your content construction process in a more “reader-oriented” way. Meaning, you’ll be answering what your readers actually want to read, making your content more valuable and making it possible to attract repeat visitors.

You have questions, debates, answers, constructive feedbacks and occasional trolling activities, nevertheless, it’s an excellent ground to perform your research for your new content.

Fortunately, there are a couple of forum search engines out there that allow you to search directly from all the gigantic population of forums out there.

Check them out:-

• http://www.boardtracker.com
• http://www.zhift.com/home.php
• http://boardreader.com
• http://omgili.com

How convenient it can be to have all the newspapers from all over the world at your finger tips, savouring the latest news while sipping your hot coffee. Although nothing beats the feeling of having a printed but just the fact that you can obtain information from any newspapers from various countries, give you an invaluable option of crafting your content right away. Most of these online sites have coverage of newspapers based on regions, so if you need more specific information from a certain region or even country, these sites are exactly for you.

Start gathering information and writing your content…

• http://www.newspapers.com
• http://www.onlinenewspapers.com
• http://www.newspapers24.com

PostRank.com offers variety of free tools for publishers and online information consumers to discover the best blogs, news, and articles by topic; to perform comparisons of engagement performance among a group of sites by topic; or to analyze their own site’s content for audience engagement in real-time and over time. PostRank helps online information consumers Find and Read What Matters.

You basically get to search over 100 million blogs for content and read till you drop. Start reading …

• http://www.PostRank.com

Review by Wendy Boswell

FindArticles, a property of LookSmart, is a search engine dedicated to finding articles “from leading academic, industry and general interest publications.” It’s an invaluable tool for the casual and advanced Web searcher.

ContentBegins says – In summary, it portrays simplicity and provides a good set of results, through a majority of non paying features. Very informative and one of the good sites out there that can provide ample amount of resources for your content research.

• Easy and relevant. FindArticles is simple to use, and delivers solid results with a minimum of tweaking.
• Deep search capability. You can access full-text articles that you can’t find using other search engines.
• It’s (mostly) free. Most of what you can search through on FindArticles costs nothing; but there are a few paid-access articles (clearly marked).

Read the full article here

• http://websearch.about.com/od/referencesearch/a/findarticles.htm

Jump over to FindArticles.com

• http://www.findarticles.com

Public domain means that the creator of the work, with no strings attached, has given up all rights to the work. It means that you may do anything with the work that you want – read it, publish it, put it on CD-ROM, change it. Public domain works can serve as the foundation for new creative works and can be quoted extensively. They can also be copied and distributed to classes or digitized and placed on course Web pages without permission or paying royalties.

Public domain content will not cost you a dime, and if you want to, you can reprint and sell however you want without having to pay a copyright holder any penalties. Public domain is used to help webmasters who find writing articles tedious, and researching for their articles too much work. The best part is that public domain materials are not restricted to textual based content, but cover images and sounds as well. If you need lots of content, it never hurts to go through this channel to fill up your information database.

A comprehensive list of public domain sites…

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Resource
• http://banis-associates.com/pdlist/

Technorati is a search engine that indexes blogs. It is for blogs what Google is for the rest of the webas it is the #1 place to go when searching for a topic of interest. It lets you looks for trends, patterns and entries by different people on similar topics or issues. The index will try to capture changes in the blogosphere that are relevant to people who are searching through the blogs. The results should deliver relevant results from authoritative sources, not just from any random sources.

Technorati is a real-time engine that tracks, measures, and ranks authority of blogs based on how they’re interlinked. Its content is more user-generated (people follow their favorites) as anything else and is used in a similar fashion to RSS. However in order for it to follow a webpage an RSS feed is not required. This blog search engine is very famous with bloggers and visitors to find information through other blogs out there.

Having such a huge Blog and RSS database, it’s without a doubt a place you must jump into to harvest further information that you need for your articles, blog, websites, emails, etc.

Check it out…

• http://www.technorati.com

RSS directories are popular these days, given the fact that RSS is widely used initially by news sites to allow others to syndicate their news stories. RSS directories can be immensely powerful, with lots of information from various topics, ranging from automobiles to diving. Most RSS directories categorize the large number of RSS data feeds available to make it easier for everybody to find and subscribe to the content one is interested in. One might opt to gather all these information through some freely available RSS aggregators out there. 

Some of the best, most used RSS directories can be found at this site…

• http://www.freemarketingzone.com/rss/rss-directory-list.html

Article directories are fast becoming popular with website owners, webmasters and promoters, as they are a good source of news, information and also manuals. Do your research and find the directories that will be useful to your needs. The listed articles have to be informative and can’t just be blatant sales pitches, making them good source of research content for anything you’re venturing into. Having article marketing as something overly common these days, it’s a good thing to know that new content is being added regularly to over hundreds of article directories out there. Rest assured this constant addition of information should be able to fill up your stomach and get some content rolling.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands article directories out there, but I’ll be listing down only a few good ones that you can visit and have your research done.

1. Ezinearticles.com
2. GoArticles.com
3. ArticleDashboard.com
4. ArticleBase.com
5. Amazines.com
6. Buzzle.com
7. ArticleAlley.com
8. ArticleCity.com
9. Ideamarketers.com
10. LinkSnoop.com
11. ArticleSnatch.com
12. EasyArticles.com
13. ArticleCube.com
14. BharatBhasha.com
15. SearchWarp.com
16. Isnare.com

PDF search engine is similar to other search engine, just input the book and author name or related keywords in the search box and it will show you the whole available downloads related to your search. You’ll get e-books as well, because the majority of e-books today are generally in PDF format. Searches will also cover sheets, forms and documents. Files gathered through this option can be used as great research materials for your content writing tasks. Some of the sites are:-

• PDFGeni – http://www.pdfgeni.com/
• PDF Search Engine – http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/

Yahoo Answers connects you with people on a global level to get your questions answered. A person posts a question and then users log on to give their best answer. Yahoo Answers is a Web 2.0 site with a social content rating system reminiscent of Digg. It is a global community of shared user knowledge.

Yahoo answers is one of the prime source of content for many people who are researching for a certain topic. It just gets better with various user interactions, so you’ll get wide diversity of answers and content to your topic of interest. Some people use Yahoo Answers to build up their credibility in their field as well, since millions of people turn to this site every day to get their questions answered, or to view other answers.

Visit Yahoo! Answers

• http://answers.yahoo.com