By Rob Pegoraro
Washington Post Staff Writer
April 1998

Every Friday since January 1997, we've profiled a Web site a week, spotlighting the places online that help you with real-world tasks. Here are 10 favorites of FFWD's WWW.Worth It column – and how they've changed since we first wrote about them.

Get Driving Directions: MapQuest is still the best all-around site for viewing maps of places and for getting directions. But competing sites Maps on Us and Zip2 are worth bookmarks too; Zip2 adds useful business-finding tools and Maps on Us offers more map-detail options.

How-To Help on Almost Anything: Learn2, possibly the most consistently useful site we've come across, is still delivering lesson after lesson in life's chores (for instance, "2torial #0454: Wash, Dry and Fold your Laundry") and has since added "LearnLets," quick, mostly reader-supplied tips on things like cleaning burnt pots and pans.

Compare Car Insurance Rates: Progressive Insurance Corp.'s site now offers rate estimate comparisons in most states, including D.C., Maryland and Virginia (and lets Virginia residents buy coverage from Progressive online). But also check out the rate-shopping tools at the InsWeb site (see our section on car ownership, starting below, for details).

Convert measurements: The slick converter at Measurements Converter is still around to transform inches into miles, gallons into liters and more; meanwhile, the less elegant page from Los Angeles software developers Entisoft has moved to http://calc.entisoft.com/scripts/unitscgi.exe.

Research Song Lyrics: The International Lyrics Server, a compilation of fan-contributed lyrics that lets you search for songs by entering a phrase or verse, now includes more than 76,000 songs (up from 48,000 when we wrote about it) and features a goofy "become Miss/Mr. Lyrics" contest in which visitors are invited to mail in (tasteful) pictures of themselves.

Look Up Things in Other Languages: The cross-language dictionary at http://www.logos.it/query/query.html includes more definitions (more than 7.5 million) but has since been joined by many other translation-service sites. For instance, the Alta Vista search engine performs erratic real-time translations of Web pages.

Use Those Mathematical Formulas You Can Never Remember: No need to remember algebraic arcana such as the formula for the area of a circle when you can plug the numbers into the convenient forms at Alchemy Handbook. Browser beware: We've had more I-can't-reach-this-site e-mail about this page than any other "WWW.Worth It" subject.

Do Reverse Phone-Book Searching: Lucent's AnyWho site provides the names and addresses (complete with maps) for listed phone numbers at http://www. anywho.com/telq.html; the site now includes a somewhat defensive "Perspective on Privacy" on its opening page.

Compare Different Computer Vendors' Prices: We looked at PriceWatch way back in March 1997, but since then we've taken much more of a liking to PriceScan; Computer ESP is a decent alternative to PriceScan. (KillerApp is yet another option, but its price lists are sometimes poorly organized.)

Find a Cash Machine: The Visa/Plus ATM finder we wrote about has since moved to http://www.visa.com/atms; you can get to similar locators for MasterCard/Cirrus and NationsBank cash machines at http://www.mastercard.com/atm/ and http://www. nationsbank.com/locate/home.htm. All three of them can generate simple maps of nearby cash machines in a few clicks.