Today I’m going to bring my top five sites on the web that everyone might not know about but should use to make their time spent on the internet a little more useful.

1. Grooveshark – A music search engine that looks all over the web to find that latest and greatest song. The site was recently redesigned, making the user interface more accommodating to the user. It has been vastly improved from the old interface, looking much cleaner and modeling itself somewhat after iTunes. Grooveshark now predominately features a way to favorite, add to library, share, or download as an mp3 or ringtone. These features now makes creating account much more appealing because now a library of songs can be created and accessed for anywhere. A radio feature has also been introduced, comparable to Pandora, which predicts what type of music the user enjoys based on music played through the service. My use of the radio feature has given some great results and I have found music I enjoy. Grooveshark is a one stop shop for all internet music needs.

2. Hulu – Hearing friends talk about the sitcom that was shown a couple nights ago is tough when I haven’t seen it. Hulu gives me a place to view full episodes or clips from popular shows on network television. Shows are posted to the site a few days after it airs on television with only a few commercial interruptions. I prefer Hulu over regular television because there are a lot less commercial interruptions and the shows can be watched on my terms. Hulu also hosts movies along with older classic shows that I’m sure people are nostalgic for. Hulu is the place to find the clip that everyone is talking about.

3. Wolfram Alpha – Calling itself a “computational knowledge engine”, this site informs the user on any data intensive equation from simple addition to complex calculus. Wolfram Alpha can be a life saver when checking if the graph of the quadratic equation is right, or solved for the variable correctly. I use it to make sure that I correctly took the derivative of a function, and it shows all the steps used in solving the problem. Wolfram Alpha provides statistics about countries, commonality of a name, and comparing stock quotes. Anything involving numbers Wolfram Alpha provides and gets it right.

4. Drop.io – This is the best way to save any type of file on the web and provides a simple way to share files. After the website loads an address is given for example drop.io/dcumbtl and has 100 MB of free space to upload any type of file but it does not stop there the user has access to unlimited addresses. It can be used to share a document, links, or audio with anyone and easily accessed by just typing in the address on any computer. Forgetting to bring the flash drive that a term paper is saved on will be a problem of the past, just upload the paper to drop.io and it can be accessed from anywhere.

5. Digg – One of the best social news websites on the web, providing links to the best news stories, videos, and pictures. All the different topics give me a wide variety of information to entertain and educate. This is one of the first sites I came to in my infancy of internet knowledge, and let me discover all that the internet has to offer. Digg stories get promoted based on the number of votes received by the registered users of the site and show up on the upcoming stories page. These stories attempt to make their way to the top stories list on the right column of the page. Within the top stories links there is always something interesting or humorous to any person browsing the web. Digg provides a gathering of the best material on the web.

Hope everyone enjoyed my lesser known gems of the web, but all of these links provide a benefit to just about anyone.