I'm a good researcher and have collected a number of investigative tools in the pursuit. I compiled a few of them for folks on what used to be the Kerry forum in "Some Resources for Newshounds".
Since that time, I've updated with more tools though I must still provide a categorical structure to the article. But I realized that these tools might serve the purposes of some of the researchers here.
A cool example, I point you to one such tool, TouchGraph Google Browser where input of an url of interest prompts the tool to probe Google for 'Related' and then shows other, similar websites graphically in something of a cladogram or taxonomy of related urls.
I invite you to check out Some Resources for Newshounds (and online researchers) where you'll find other tools such as GoogleLab's 'Scholar' (academic search tool) and NameBase (ID other names linked in docs to your query name). I hope that you'd add similar, useful links to my comments here or there. Perhaps that list can serve as the start of a dKosopedial entry on research tools?!
Hope you find these tools as useful as I have.