I have often recommended academic.live.com by Microsoft as a worthy rival to Google Scholar. At the very least, it was superior in its interface and sorting capabilities. Unfortunately, it provided much less relevant results in the humanities (focusing on more recent publications).

iBreadCrumbs.com offers a simple way for students to record their online research and share their results with others. It works by installing a toolbar in Firefox (version 2 only so far) that can be turned on when you're doing research and collects websites you find relevant.

Another reason why everyone should be using Firefox - you can improve your browsing experience so much with so many handy extensions. This one will pronounce words for you. This is particularly handy for academics who often run into words that are said outloud only infrequently (and this goes for both native and non-native speakers).

The Study Hacks blog offers a number of interesting tips culled from interviews with professional  writers. Not surprisingly, a session on thesis writing will offer similar tips. Of course, everybody is slightly different but I suspect that everyone should be able tick off at least 4 or 5 tips if they want to have any success at