Often in my writing I need to fact check, or do research. Just recently I needed to look up how to say "orange soda" in Chinese, a good recipe for chocolate cake, and in the past several days I've been investigating Ch'an sect Buddhism, and vegetarianism.
The Internet is such an amazing resource for me. Between factual pages, reference sites like Wikipedia, message boards, and social media I can go from no knowledge of a subject to enough to comfortably write it into a story.
It's such an ingrained part of my daily existence, I usually just take it for granted.
But really, it's amazing.