RADIO

Pandora Type in the name of your favorite band, and within moments the site will be streaming a radio station, featuring songs from that band and others like it, to your desktop through your browser — no registration and no downloads required. You can "tune" the play list by using the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. A new Backstage section is a searchable directory of artists and albums — "your door to the music universe" — courtesy of the Music Genome Project.

VIDEO BLOG

The 9 Each weekday morning, this vlog delivers some of the greatest stuff that can be found online — video clips, movie trailers, online discussions, blog posts, news stories, quirky websites — as a five-minute streaming videocast. The must-clicks, presented as a countdown and linked from the home page, range from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day to movie-poster spoofs in http://hoffgallery.com/index.php. Honorable mention goes to Rocketboom 2.0, a mix of Daily Show-esque reports, Web news and commentary on Internet culture. For more silliness, head to Ask A Ninja . And stop by It's Jerry Time!, for hilarious, cleverly-animated "true-life" tales.

PUZZLES

Number Logic This site offers a hefty supply of puzzles to tackle. Work independently or compete head-to-head against other registered users. There are three levels of difficulty; the site will time you (there's a pause button if you need to take a breather) and, if you wish, "validate" your answers (and highlight any mistakes). You don't have to sign in to use the site — but you do if you want to record scores.

MOOD LIFTER

Cute Overload Because sometimes you just need to look at pictures of kittens. Or farm animals. Or hedgehogs. This popular blog provides a daily dose of cute imagery, found somewhere on the Internet or emailed in by a fan. Browse categories ("Pocket Pets," "Cats N Racks") or follow the site's links to more cuteness at sites like Baby Animalz.com and Pandafix .

PAINTING

Jackson Pollock by Miltos Manetas Here's a place where you can indulge your inner abstract expressionist: move your mouse to splatter virtual paint and click to change the color. To create a hard copy, right-click on the "canvas" and select Print.

FREE GAMES

Shockwave You'll find a variety of ways to procrastinate here — there are games you can play by yourself, and multiplayer games; flash games you play inside your browser, and games you download. You can browse by category or search by keyword (check out Loop, under Adventure).

BLOG ART

Drawn! This collaborative blog, geared to "anybody who likes to draw," is produced for artists by artists for the purpose of sharing links — mainly sites where you can view individual artists' works — and resources. Even if you're not an aspiring Picasso, you'll enjoy the illustrations, cartoons, animated video podcasts and other works highlighted here.

INDIE PICKS

Sundance Splinks This collection of funky, artsy sites compiled by Sundance Festival staff Select images and flash animations (grouped under Watchamacallits, Doohickies and Wigglies, among other categories) and drag them onto a virtual scene — and the fabulously droll Billy Harvey Music.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Photo Muse A joint project by the International Center of Photography in New York City and the George Eastman House in Rochester (the world's oldest photography museum), Search by photographer — listed in the drop-down menu, including Weegee (109 works) and Gordon Parks (40) — or keyword. See: Alfred Eisenstaedt's 1963 shot of children at a puppet theater in the Tuileries, Paris.

RADIO

Wolfgang's Vault Click "Vault Radio" to stream recordings of live performances of all your favorite rockers from the 1960s and '70s: The Doors, The Stones, Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin, Elvis Costello and lots more. Vault Radio plays selected tracks from these concerts in an FM-quality, 128K digital radio stream. Click "In Rotation" to see what's included in the current stream; it's always changing.

PODCASTS

Podcast Pickle The sheer quantity of podcasts and videocasts now available make the existence of sites like Podcast Pickle a necessity. The directory boasted nearly 10,000 casts. Browse the Top 100 list or weekly picks to find something worth loading onto your own portable player.

VIDEO WORLD

YouTube The network posts teaser clips from hit shows like The Office. Relive treasures such as Journey's "Separate Ways", observe a Great White grabbing lunch or see what folks with too much free time can do with a digicam and a dream. Often, video quality isn't great, and a lot of the stuff is junk, yet somehow we can't stop digging around in it.

GENERAL INTEREST

Snap This new Google-competitor records and analyzes past searches to help determine relevancy, favoring sites where surfers visited most frequently and lingered the longest. Search results are displayed on the left side of the page, while the other side provides a visual preview (which you can choose to view in small, medium or large). Ask.com offers previews too — courtesy of a little binoculars icon placed next to certain links — and boasts a new Blogs & Feeds search tool too.

BUSINESS

Accoona This engine uses artificial intelligence to "understand" the meaning of the keywords in your query in an effort to deliver more relevant results. Drop-down menus allow you to set some search parameters, such as business type and location; run a News search for recent articles, Business search for facts and figures, or a Web search for relevant links. PubSub is also useful; it lets you "subscribe" to a particular search, after which the engine will continue to retrieve new information related to your search as it appears on blogs, in newsgroup discussions or in SEC filings, automatically refreshing your search results so they are ready (one click away from the home page) when you want them.

PICTURES AND VIDEO

Pixsy This clever engine extracts images and videos from the RSS feeds of a variety of content providers, from YouTube to the BBC. Click on a source — say, The New York Times — from the "Browse Recently Added" box on the lower right-hand side of the home page, and you'll get a fresh batch of thumbnails, which serve as direct links to the material. Or browse by category to see the latest content to come online. Currently stocking some 10 million items in its searchable bank, Pixsy intends to have 1 billion items in store by year end. As a backup resource, there's always Google Images and Google Video.

PHONE NUMBERS

Argali White & Yellow Download the free software offered here and you can search multiple telephone directories (Google's SuperPages, WhitePages.com and more than a dozen others) simultaneously. You can elect to pay for a premium version, which delivers results without ads.

HEALTH

Kosmix This specialized search engine scours more than 3.2 billion general web pages and divides its results into subcategories — the Health engine, for example, groups links under treatment, prevention, symptoms, clinical trials and others headings — for more efficient info-gathering. It's also built to deliver more relevant links, by pulling from the part of its index that makes the most sense (it doesn't bother with travel sites if the keyword is diabetes, for example). The specialized health search engine is the farthest along — it graduated from the alpha test phase to beta in February — but Kosmix has been busy adding new subject areas, including Finance, Travel and U.S. politics, and, most recently, video games.

WEB DEFENSE

McAfee SiteAdvisor Here you'll find a free downloadable application that, once installed inside your own Web browser (it works with FireFox and Internet Explorer), aims to keep you out of trouble — or, to be precise, stop you from clicking through to websites where spyware, worms, and other cyber threats lurk. The program attaches tiny color-coded icons to links that appear on a list of search returns — a green check means it's safe to proceed, a red X means it's not; a yellow icon indicates nuisances such as spam or pop-ups. Why would you need this? Because simply clicking through to a suspect site can wreak havoc on a PC, and risky sites comprise a growing portion of search returns. If you want a service that will flag for inappropriate content such as porn, try Scandoo.

FLIGHT PLANS

Kayak A meta-search site useful for planning your next trip. You can search airfares to different cities simultaneously (click "multi-city search"); Fare Watch lets you track any number of trip itineraries and receive email alerts when a fare meets your specified price. Kayak Buzz lists the best fares to 25 popular destinations.

HOME APPRAISALS

Zillow This site uses tax records, sales history and actual amounts paid for comparable properties in your area to calculate an estimate ("Zestimate") of your home's worth. You don't have to identify yourself or deal with a broker to use the service. Check out the new color-coded "heat maps" of 17 cities that compare Zestimates per square foot by location.

PARKS

Central Park This comprehensive, interactive guide to one of the world's most famous public spaces offers up-to-date information on 43 different attractions, from the Carousel to the Conservatory Garden, Strawberry Fields to the Swedish Cottage. A model of organization and design, it's a pleasure to navigate.