Some useful sites

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Email Finance Genealogy

General research Health Online learning

Online shopping Travel

Email

These all seem pretty good, in my opinion. I haven't gotten to test whalemail yet, though.

mail.yahoo.com - Most popular
hotmail.com - Also popular
www.whalemail.com - For really big attachments 

www.fepg.net - Free E-mail Providers Guide - Reviews of more than 700 free email providers in over 55 countries.

Finance

Best bet: Your own financial company. Financial information seems like the last thing you should be surfing around for.  Fortunately, most large finance-related companies operate on the principle that the best customer is an educated customer, and so most large companies have excellent, informative web sites.

Most large financial companies have WWW addresses that follow the same pattern: www.companyname.com.  E.g.

www.fidelity.com
www.vanguard.com

If the company name has more than one word, try typing all the letters with no spaces.

www.deanwitter.com
www.smithbarney.com

Other sources:

quicken.com - From the popular budget software
fool.com - Motley Fool - investment advice
etrade.com - Trade stocks yourself
ameritrade.com - same thing

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genealogy.about.com

www.cyndislist.com

www.genhomepage.com

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Best Bet: www.britannica.com - The encyclopedia Britannica and an excellent reviewed web guide.

www.infoplease.com - The popular almanac, online
encarta.msn.com- Microsoft's encyclopedia's short entries, online

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Best Bet: www.ama-assn.org , the AMA web site. Credibility and comprehensiveness are two major needs for medical web sites, and the AMA site seems to fill both well.

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Best bet: www.caso.com - A searchable database of online courses at accredited higher education institutions.

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Best bets:

Comparison site - www.mysimon.com - Given a precise, mass-market Internet item (book, CD's, electronics, software, probably not flower arrangements or food), Simon can comparison shop across thousands of retailers and deliver results sorted by price including shipping.That last feature makes Simon faster than most retailer sites (like amazon.com) themselves. I use Simon literally every time before I buy something.

Auctions: e-bay.com
Books: Amazon.com
Catalog retailers: check websites of your favorite retailers, e.g. www.harryanddavid.com, www.landsend.com, www.llbean.com
Flowers: 1800flowers.com
Garden: garden.com
Music: CDNow.com
Toys: Etoys.com

Other sources

Catalog retailers

www.catalogcity.com - huge database of catalog retailers

Comparison shopping

Bottomdollar.com - shopping search engine Compare.net - interactive buyer's guide.
Consumerreports.com - some free content; otherwise $3 per month.

General, wide, shopping sites

www.internet-mall.com is a conglomeration of online shopping sites. If you want a site which has pretty much everything, this is it -

www.wal-mart.com - No, I'm not kidding. And you know what? It's a pretty good site.

shopping.yahoo.com - Like the regular Yahoo directory, with subject trees, but only for shopping.

Gift ideas

Findgift.com is an interesting service that recommends gifts based on a few preferences that you provide, e.g. gender/age/price/interests/occassions.
911gifs.com is similar and a bit better designed.

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Best bets: Travelocity.com and Expedia.com.  The advantage of these sites is that they have established themselves as leaders. So (a) they have an earned reputation to protect, and (b) because everyone recognizes them as leaders, everyone with travel-related products to sell knows that these are the places to advertise.

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