Web Sites

BET Holdings Inc., owner of Black Entertainment Television, unveiled a Web site aimed at the black community that will offer e-mail, instant messaging and chat features as well as links to other Web sites. BET said the venture will receive $35 million in backing from its four partners: Microsoft Corp.; USA Networks Inc.; the U.S. arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.; and AT&T Corp.'s Liberty Digital, the online media company run by cable magnate John Malone. Liberty holds a 34% stake in BET.

Airline Sites The following is a sampling of Web sites of major U.S. airlines. Alaska Airlines, http://www.alaskaair.com. Posts Web specials on Tuesdays for last-minute weekend travel, and Internet specials for travel any time. Often features good deals from L.A. to cities in the Pacific Northwest. American, http://www.aa.com. Posts Net SAAver Fares on Wednesdays for travel two weekends later. Site permits users to price and book flights on other airlines besides American.

There are thousands and thousands of sites devoted to travel in the Internet universe, and their numbers are growing daily. The problem, cyber-travelers are finding, is sorting through all those sites and finding truly useful ones. Here to help is a sampling of stellar Web sites picked by experts in online travel planning: Yahoo! Travel (http://travel.yahoo.com).

Just as California offers more vacation options than rush-hour taillights on the San Diego Freeway, cyberspace is jammed with thousands of commercial, nonprofit and personal Web sites peddling the joys of traveling in the Golden State. Here's a sampling of bookmark-worthy examples, encompassing everything from San Francisco shopping to San Bernardino ski slopes. California Office of Tourism (www.gocalif.

At Autobytel.com's semiannual meeting with some of its top car-dealer customers in Sedona, Ariz., which continues today, General Motors Corp.'s recently unveiled car-selling Web site will be a major topic of discussion, according to the Irvine company's president. The car maker's site is designed to get customers the best price by having dealers bid against each other for the business.

For those who can't get enough of the Gore campaign, you can see Internet images of Gore's campaign headquarters in Nashville, a new one every 10 seconds. Go to http://www.algore.com and click on "NashvilleCam." Also on the updated Gore Web page: a timer that answers to the second the question "How long has George W. Bush avoided debating Al Gore?" * Compiled by JOHN TYRRELL and MALOY MOORE / Los Angeles Times

A fan of British rock act the Cure wants to check out the band's site on the World Wide Web. Not the one developed by the record label or hundreds of others created by fellow admirers. He wants the official Cure site, the one spawned out of singer Robert Smith's Powerbook and maintained from the back of the musician's tour bus. So the fan goes to an online search engine--say, Yahoo!--and punches in the band's name. The result--227 sites to wade through before stumbling across www.thecure.

Name: Film Scouts Address: http://www.filmscouts.com/index.html What it is: Created and maintained by Webcast Multimedia Inc., Film Scouts is set up like a virtual diorama of a movie theater; the curtains even open to let you know what screening rooms to enter. Once you're inside, the projectionist will serve up film trailers and stills, music clips, bios of the cast and crew and reviews.