Enterprise Quest – Ideas and know-how for small business.
Although this site is new to me, it has been around for about two years. This is the home of a free weekly bulletin called EnterQuest, published by Cobweb Information and aimed at UK small businesses. As well as tips and ideas on running a small business EnterQuest also keeps you up to date with legal issues, offers IT tips (for example keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Word), and reviews web sites of interest to SMEs. You can read the bulletin on the web site or have it delivered to your email box. A pity there is no RSS feed at present but I’ll make do with the email.

Our Property repackages Land Registry data and data from the Registrars of Scotland. It enables you to search for properties that have been sold since 2000 by street, town and postcode and displays the price that the property or properties were sold for.

They now offer free sales alerts. You can monitor new sales at up to 10 different locations around the UK. Enter the postcodes that you are interested in, and if a new sale is registered in the database within 500 metres of that postcode you receive an email alert. Very useful if you are buying or selling a house and want to compare prices, or if you are just plain nosey and want to know how much your neighbour paid for their property!

Free RSS News Feeds, Free Custom RSS News Feeds – Moreover Technologies

Moreover now allows you to set up your own feed and alerts. Previously, only pre-defined RSS feeds were available free of charge.

Acronyma

Claims to be the largest database of acronyms and abbreviations on the web with over 471000 acronyms. Acronymfinder.com appears to have more definitions (it claims to have 2,020,000) and sorts the definitions into categories, for example Science and Medicine, Slang and Chat. Acronyma returned fewer results with my test searches but as well as English, it also offers definitions of Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese acronyms.

AskOxford: Collective Terms for Animals

A useful section of the Oxford Dictionaries site for settling arguments and checking your pub quiz Q&A. We were having a heated discussion regarding the correct collective noun for a group of hippopotamuses. Yes, sad, isn’t it? We had a laptop and mobile coms but a Google search came up with all sorts of terms, some of them hotly disputed. Where do we Brits go to in situations such as this? Answer – the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Unfortunately, we were not in a venue where I could access my own multi volume hard copy but AskOxford came up with the answer, or rather answers. For the record, a group of hippos can be a pod, a bloat, a herd or a school. Now you know!

EEVL Xtra

A new service from EEVL that helps you find articles, key websites, books, the latest industry news, job announcements, ejournals, eprints, technical reports,

and the latest research in engineering, mathematics, and computing. EEVL Xtra searches databases and resources that most search engines miss.

Our Property – Property and house prices revealed – OurProperty.co.uk

One of the many services that repackages the Land Registry’s data but this one offers users 20 free searches a week. You get to see the address of the property, the date it was sold and how much it was sold for. It does not give the name of the owner or the name of the lender. For that, you have to use the Land Registry’s priced service. At present, the data goes back to 2000 and covers England and Wales only. “Our Property” plans to add Scottish data in the near future.

The quick search on the home page enables you to search by post code but you can refine your search or use the Advanced Search to limit your results by street, town or locality, freehold/leasehold, house type (detached, terraced, flat etc.) and date.

If you use up your 20 searches you can top them up by either recommending a friend for 5 free searches or by signing up to a weekly newsletter which contains a voucher for 20 free searches.

A really neat site.