Genie Tyburski has written a useful article which appears in the November issue of e-LOC. In Answers in Unusual Places, she offers tips on using non-traditional sources such as eBay and Amazon.com as research tools.
Product descriptions in eBay, she advises, may contain information about manufacturers, citations for articles appearing in old magazines, text from the front or back cover of a book or from inside a dust jacket, old advertising slogans or other useful information. She offers advanced search tips to help you find these gems.
Amazon.com’s “Search Inside the Book” lets you dig inside selected portions of some books. She recommends Amazon.com’s A9 search engine which indexes Web results as well as books.