A friend will be visiting Sicily this fall and would like to look for
family relatives or history.  Her family is from Palermo, but she has
no present contact with anyone there.  Is there a way to research this
on the Web?

Hello rrgaga-ga

Rootsweb has a surname list from Sicily:
http://www.rootsweb.com/~itasic/ and also civil record information
http://www.rootsweb.com/~itawgw/prov/15/sicily.htm

Italiansrus.com has general surname databases, details of groups who
can help your friend in her investigations, ship passenger lists of
Italian emigrants, and more
http://www.italiansrus.com/resources/genealogy.htm

Sicilian surnames search engine:
http://sicilia.indettaglio.it/eng/cognomi/motore/motore.html

Sicilian surname list:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~itasicily/

A thread about Sicilian families:
http://genforum.genealogy.com/italy/messages/25.html
And a Sicilian forum on the same site
http://genforum.genealogy.com/italy/sicily/

GenDir has a searchable index of Palermo birth records, 1876-85 
http://www.gendir.com/link_detail/1191

At the bottom of this page,
http://sicilia.indettaglio.it/eng/provincie/pa/provpa.html , there is
a list of towns in Palermo province.  If you click on the link for a
town, you will be taken to a page with general information and also a
link to a list of surnames from that town

ItalyLink lists sites relating to Italian geneaology in general
http://www.italylink.com/genealogy.html

Ship passenger lists, include four ships from Palermo, which sailed in
1880 http://khuish.tripod.com/ships.htm

Links to sites dealing with individual family names from Sicily and
other resources http://italiangenealogy.tripod.com/italianfamilytrees_2.html
  Other pages on this sites list links to other useful resources for
genealogical research on Italian families.

Best of Sicily has some advice for doing research once your friend is
in Sicily http://www.bestofsicily.com/genealogy.htm

If your friend is willing to pay for professional assistance:
GenTracer offers paid services in Italian genealogical research. A
4-hour project, which costs $160, is said usually to extend the family
line by 2-3 generations, with translations of all documents supplied.
http://www.gentracer.com/italy.html
Another site offers researchers who are based in Sicily at $175 per
day: http://www.initaly.com/gene/research.htm

Search strategy: Sicily, genealogy on Google
(://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&q=genealogy+Sicily)
, and then I explored links from some of the retrieved web sites.

I wish your friend the best of luck with her search