Sputtr is a cool service I've been using recently. It allows you to search across a number of search engines and websites really quickly.

How it works is you type your search query into the big box, then click on the search service you want to use. There's a massive choice: you can search a number of Google properties like news, blogs and Google Groups. You can search across social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious. Technorati (if anyone still uses it), Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube. There's a lot of choice.

Better yet, if you create an account with the service, you can take away the buttons you don't want and add searches to other services that you want to query. You can also choose to make the search results open up in a new browser tab, which makes it easier to return to Sputtr and do follow-up searches.

I've been using it for music reviews on Unreality Music recently, and it's sped my process up significantly. From finding images of singles to getting background information via Wikipedia, embeddable videos on YouTube or DailyMotion and then linking to other reviewers using Google BlogSearch, it makes life infinitely easier.

If you're using the web frequently for research, I highly recommend giving Sputtr a try. It's such a simple idea, exceptionally well executed.