Ever since I had 10 fingers and toes, it’s always irked me that we only work in base 10. What about all the other bases? What about the Simpsons, who only have 8 fingers? Shouldn’t they work in base 8? Why impose our base 10 numbering system on innocent cartoons who only have 8 digits? It seems totalitarian to me. So therefore, I will try to make amends to this injustice by giving a review of last year, which not surprisingly ends with an 8. My 8 favorite alts that I’ve written about. In no particular order, they are:

HebrewBooks.org

I like this one for personal reasons. As someone with a rather extensive library of Biblical and Talmudic commentary, I know how expensive and cumbersome these things can get. My Babylonian Talmud, for example, takes up an entire shelf. My medieval Bible commentaries, an entire case. It’s nice having the books and slowly going through them (I only have time for two commentaries a year at this point) but what if I don’t have something and I have to look it up? No problem. I’ll go to HebrewBooks.

Hebrewbooks.org is attempting to build a database of every single Jewish Law source ever printed in the history of whenever it was we started writing about this stuff. It’s a pretty long history, and they have the biggest PDF database in existence, no question. What’s the coolest part about this? Say I can’t find a book. It’s out of print, which happens often. I’ll type it in on Hebrewbooks and then print it out at Kinkos, bind it, and voila! It’s mine. Sometimes it’s better even if I can find the book, so I don’t have to go into a bookstore in an Ultra Orthodox city where I’m the only one wearing jeans and a leather jacket in a crowd of long black coats and big fuzzy Cossack-hats.

Zubican – The Comprehensive US Business Search

More applicable to the mainstream here. Every legal registered business in the United States at your fingertips. If you think about it, it’s really amazing. I have no idea how they did it. Zubican, saves time, money, frustration, and might be a factor in helping us drag our recession-inflicted Madoff –bludgeoned business economy out of the bottomless pit we now find ourselves in. Thank the Lord the market finally stopped crashing .

More important than you or me as individuals, this site helps businesses make contacts with one another by eliminating the middleman and putting the entire US business infrastructure online. Every company has a profile, the database is of course entirely searchable by many categories and queries, and business owners can claim a profile and edit it to update their info.

Viewzi

One of the niftiest of the visual search team. Viewzi gives you many, many different options in how you want to view your information, and I go so far to say that some of them are indeed beautiful. No longer just a list of blue links that magically turn you arrow pointer into a hand pointer (WOW! What amazing visual effects!) but real visually organized information you can see from a bird’s eye view.

Speaking of visual:

Newsflashr – Gal Arav

This one I wasn’t so crazy about at first, but then something happened. Namely, a war broke out in my backyard. Living right near Tel Aviv, I am about 7 miles out of the range Hamas has achieved in its ability to shoot rockets into my country. With friends on the verge of invading the Gaza strip and who knows what’s going to happen, I’m losing sleep. I have no TV. Just the internet. What if CNN missed something? What if a ground invasion already happened but the sites I normally check haven’t reported it yet?

Thus, I discovered the importance of Newsflashr. (Check the last installment on the post in that link.) All I do is type in “Gaza” or “עזה” in Hebrew (Newsflashr itself is an Israeli-owned site) and the absolute latest is splayed right in front of me in links that are updated from 10’s of sites every 15 minutes.

This could contribute to news addiction in times of hysteria, so use with discretion.

Wonderhowto

This one is GREAT. One of my favorite video alts. Allow me to explain why. One of my gigs is teaching singles some pick-up tactics for religious dating purposes. (Recently I’ve noted that religious singles have problems understanding the game and rules and language of attraction of potential mates.) One of my serious resources is this very site. Wonderhowto’s videos are all how-to (make sense?), and the section I check back to most often are the bar and parlor tricks. Top quality, I show these to my students to give them some value-demonstrating routines. All videos are rated with grades, so you know which ones are worth your viewing time.

Want to know how to fix a leaky faucet? Cursed things, they keep dripping. Wonderhowto? No longer. Want to learn how to brew beer? I do. And now I know. So many things, so little time, so much potential for self-improvement, it blows you away…

TheFindGreen

A green shopping engine. With economists saying that Green Chips and green companies and green products being the wave of the economic future, TheFindGreen may find its way into the throng as a central player. As easy to use as Amazon, finding what you actually search for, and of nearly limitless variety. TheFindGreen can minimize your environmental imprint the more you use it.

Jogli – The Music Without the Download

At first I wasn’t so impressed, but then, somehow, I changed. You’re not a fool to think you can change a man. Or maybe you are. Or maybe that’s irrelevant. What’s relevnet is that Jogli may as well be the DJ at your upcoming wedding.

Type in a song, it will give you the best YouTube versions of that song out there. Pick the best one, rate it, share your playlists. Hook up speakers to your computer, and you have your own free music box. Have an iPhone? Then go to Jogli, make up your playlist and hit play. As long as you have an internet connection, you have your music at hand, no downloading, no RIAA lawsuits, now hard drive clogging with mp3’s that may or may not be infected with weird viruses that make your computer spontaneously break out with computer-botulism. That really stinks, by the way. And I’m not even sure what it is. It just sounds really bad, and I think I may have made it up.

And who can live without happy hour? Seriously, 6 bucks a glass? What are you on? It obviously ain’t beer, because that would be too expensive. The lengthy tongue-tying eight-syllable homepage notwithstanding, MidSouthAlcoholicSupply (heretofore abbreviated as MSAS for convenience) has its Happy Hour search tool.

I am a big fan of beer. My favorite is Arrogant Bastard Ale, available in San Diego, New York, and selected outlets throughout the US. I can’t get it in Israel, which is sad, but I did make my Hanukah Menorah out of beer bottles, which I put glass holders in, filled with water and topped it with olive oil and some floating wicks. It was totally awesome. The beer bottle which were supposed to last one day and be thrown out, lasted for 8 whole days while I used them as bases for candles.

Go to the Happy Hour section of MSAS, search a city. They’ll find you beer for two bucks wherever it can be found in your area. And the cheaper the beer, the more people, the more opportunity to test out your skills in the field. Bar owners can add their info easily, and you can save money and kick back a cold one.

And there, you have it, my Top 8 favorites since joining the AltSearchEngines team.