I headed online to start researching (I was looking for a used car) but was overwhelmed by an avalanche of information. Everyone seemed to have something to say about cars, whether in blogs, community forums, editorial reviews, Kelley Blue Book values, Carfax reports or local dealer sites. As I discussed my findings with friends and family, more people than not were surprised to hear about the variety of research and price comparisons available online.

This week’s column is an overview of sites that may help you or someone you know browse for a new or used car on the Web. I used sites ranging from trusted resources like ConsumerReports.org to search engine tools like Yahoo Autos. This column can’t possibly mention every car-searching resource on the Web; rather, it’s just a taste of what’s available.

Edmunds.com and ConsumerReports.org both feature informative data on a number of new and used vehicles. Edmunds is a free site specifically geared toward cars, including an online magazine for enthusiasts called Inside Line and a Web forum for discussions about automobiles called CarSpace. I used various tools on Edmunds.com, including one that estimates the true cost to own a specific car over time. I especially enjoyed reading an article titled “Confessions of a Car Salesman,” which proved uncanny in predicting a range of tricks and techniques the salespeople used when I first visited a car dealership.

Edmunds offers a four-step pricing system, which includes getting quotes from dealers, and a payment calculator, which estimates monthly payments. Edmunds teams up with AutoTrader.com to help perform searches for certified pre-owned or used cars online.

Consumer Reports covers products as well as cars but keeps much of its most useful data behind a Web-site subscription, which costs $26 annually or $5.95 monthly (magazine subscribers can pay a discounted price of $19 a year). You need this subscription to access CR’s respected ratings and certain sections of its Web forums. These ratings were helpful to me, as they assessed numerous aspects of specific car models, including trouble spots by year, performance, safety and fuel economy.

CR also offers valuable lists such as “All Recommended Cars,” “Best and Worst Used Cars” and “Reliable Used Cars by Price.” A car-buying calculator is an asset to this site that helps you decide whether it would be smarter to buy or lease a vehicle.

Google, Yahoo and AOL all present special search-results pages when you search for a specific car for sale, using drop-down menus and various ways to sort results. Google Base for automobiles, found by selecting “Vehicles” from www.google.com/base, is a list of data submitted to Google. Drop-down menus help broaden or narrow results by sorting the data according to certain attributes, such as make or price. Vehicle-search results can be viewed in one of three formats: List View, Table View or Map View — an illustration of each car’s location in relationship to a Zip Code. I found Table View most useful because it organized data in smart, spreadsheet-like displays so I could quickly skim through columns listing price, color, amenities and mileage.

But not all car searches within Google Base returned the same drop-down-menu options for sorting. In a few instances, I couldn’t sort my search results by model year. Google Base does show the date on which each car was listed.

Yahoo Autos, found at www.autos.yahoo.com, teamed up with Cars.com to offer richer content, including a Car Finder feature that helps people narrow down what type of new car they might like according to price, driving style and fuel (type and economy). Yahoo even tries to answer car questions with its Yahoo Answers Q&A tool, which lets people submit questions. I found user reviews on this site, as well as expert reviews provided by NewCarTestDrive.com, an auto-review site.

The used-car section in Yahoo Autos reminded me of Google with its drop-down menus and results that displayed in list or map views. List view shows plenty of information in one glance, including an image of the car for sale and the number of additional available photos. From this list, users can link directly to view or order Carfax reports or email the dealer, saving time wasted on excess mouse clicks and browsing.

AOL Autos, found at http://autos.aol.com, does a nice job of integrating Web 2.0 features such as pop-up menus that appear within a page rather than in an entirely new Web page. Vehicle-search results are found by entering a few criteria for a new or used car, and used-car results can be further narrowed by adding or subtracting desired specifics listed on the far left of the screen. Some specs include model type, engine, year or extras like heated seats or a sunroof.

This site can also condense numerous used-car listings into one graph that illustrates car prices in relationship to mileage or year. Selecting any point on the graph reveals a short description of a vehicle’s location, price and mileage. For new cars, AOL Autos offers lengthy expert reviews from NewCarTestDrive.com, as well as user reviews.

Both Yahoo Autos and AOL Autos walk users through steps to get price quotes from dealers for new cars.

Carfax.com provides car-history reports using vehicle-identification numbers, or VINs. For a $30 fee, used-car buyers can use Carfax.com for 30 days. This report shows a vehicle’s history such as if it was a rental or not, how many different owners it had, how long each owner possessed the vehicle and where it came from. Tips pop up within these reports, including one that warned me about “curbstoning,” a term that describes an individual without a dealer’s license looking to sell a number of cars by posing as a private seller.

As can be expected, many newspaper Web sites offer automobile sections that display digitized classified ads, so be sure to check your local paper’s Web site.

At the end of the day, test-driving a car will be a true test as to whether or not you like it — no matter how much research you’ve done online. But knowing your stuff before you visit a dealership can save money and time.

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com.

At one time or another, all of us have been handed a Christmas or birthday gift list that includes seemingly simple items such as “coffee maker,” “luggage,” or the most dreaded item of all, “TV.” But choosing the right one is no easy task. Once you’re actually in the store, surrounded by options, it’s easy to buy the worst brand of coffee maker, or the luggage that is infamous for wearing out too soon, or the overly expensive television set.

Wouldn’t it be easier if you had some independent help, right there in the store, to make the best choice and resist the often bad information provided by salespeople?

Consumer Reports certainly thinks so. This week, it introduced a cellphone application, ShopSmart, that allows you to carry the magazine’s famous product comparisons and ratings with you while shopping, right on your mobile phone. Available for Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel customers just in time for the holiday shopping season, this new service costs $3.99 a month. Cingular will start carrying ShopSmart next month.

ShopSmart is simply organized.

The idea is that, while you’re in a store, dazed by a row of similar-looking products like digital cameras, you can just whip out your cellphone, launch ShopSmart, and see which camera Consumer Reports recommends, or how it rates the particular camera you’re holding.

We love and trust Consumer Reports, which runs a very successful and useful paid Web site in addition to its legendary print magazine. But we were dubious. How well would a cellphone handle such an application? Would it be easy for last-minute shoppers to rapidly receive, read and use the data provided by ShopSmart? So, we tested this new application using a Verizon LG VX8100 cellphone — a newer phone that runs on Verizon’s ultrafast EV-DO network, which downloads data at about the speed of a low-end home DSL connection.

(Consumer Reports has a content-sharing relationship with The Wall Street Journal Online. See some recent reports from Consumer Reports at WSJ.com/Personal Journal.)

Overall, we were impressed by ShopSmart’s straightforward and easy-to-use approach. Each screen was simple to read at a glance, and browsing from one screen to the next took just a couple of seconds. We especially liked the program’s ability to add certain products to a “Favorites” list, for accessing later, and a feature that lets you email the ShopSmart data to yourself, or anyone else, for later perusal.

There are a couple of downsides. For now, ShopSmart covers only three categories of products — electronics, appliances, and home and garden. It omits important categories Consumer Reports covers in print and online, including cars, personal finance, food and travel. So it won’t help you to buy that luggage, even though the magazine reviewed it. And people who already subscribe to the magazine and/or the Web site don’t get it free. Like everyone else, they have to pay the $3.99 monthly fee.

Also, while performance was very good on our test phone running on the fast EV-DO network, the product-information downloads would be much, much slower at the typical network speeds most people use.

The program is updated weekly. It uses Yahoo Shopping to provide up-to-date price ranges for each product, listing prices from online stores as well as retail chains, so you can find where each product is sold for the lowest cost.

After downloading ShopSmart through your phone carrier’s built-in online store — our phone used Verizon’s Get It Now — it can be opened by pressing just a few keys. This might be particularly useful for shoppers who use this program only once in a while, so they don’t easily forget how to get started.

To make the best use of the phone’s small display, ShopSmart is simply organized into different sections using five tabs labeled Ratings, Search, Favorites, Articles and About. The products themselves are divided into three main categories: Appliances, Electronics, and Home and Garden. Product types are listed alphabetically within each category, 10 per screen. Under the Search tab, we found that the Appliances category included 20 different types, starting with air conditioners and ending with washing machines, including coffee makers and gas ranges along the way.

The ShopSmart cellphone program costs $3.99 per month.

Still within Search, we took a look at the “Canister Vacuum Cleaners,” finding 21 different brands listed. Three Hoover vacuums were reviewed in ShopSmart, two receiving scores of 65 and 64. These scores were listed in red print directly to the right of the product name and model number.

More information can be found by selecting a particular model; we chose the Hoover WindTunnel Plus S3639 and saw a clearly labeled list including price range ($136 to $319), overall score (65), cleaning carpet, cleaning bare floors, cleaning with tools, noise, emissions, ease of use, bag (yes) and brush on/off (yes).

One of five color-coded symbols appears next to each of the features rated by Consumer Reports, such as how well the vacuum did cleaning carpet or bare floors. By selecting each category, you can read a brief description of how each rating was determined, and what each symbol means on a scale of excellent to poor.

We selected the price-range category and saw where the vacuum was being sold for only $136 — at a place called Dmart2000 — and where it was selling for $229 — at Ace Hardware. (An option to show only retail chains is also available.) We had never heard of Dmart2000, but found that we could send an email to ourselves containing information on the retailer, provided by Yahoo Shopping.

Sure enough, this email hit our accounts in a matter of seconds, and we learned that Dmart2000 is an online discount department store. Yahoo also provided details about the store’s customer-care contact information and methods of payment.

Even more important, this email contained the full Consumer Reports rating charts on the product category, in color, as opposed to the smaller selection of ratings that appears on the ShopSmart phone program. This more detailed chart could be useful for people who want to continue their research back home at a computer, or who want to call from the store to discuss the purchase with somebody sitting at a computer. You could potentially view this email on your phone, though most phones have lousy email software, making this difficult to do.

Another nice feature of ShopSmart allows you to quickly get back to information about particular products. If you check a “Favorites” icon while reading about products, you can revisit those products directly from ShopSmart’s home screen by simply selecting the “Favorites” tab.

A section labeled “Articles” included short reads about good deals on appliances, High Definition TV and computerized paint color. These aren’t just fluffy pieces — they’re articles detailing the experiences that Consumer Reports has had while trying out various products. Though they may require a little more time to read, even in their short version, they are usually highly useful.

This holiday season, keep in mind that while it’s true that it’s the thought that counts, getting the right gift is a good idea as well. And having Consumer Reports on your phone can make that task a lot easier.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com