Internet News

US Government-Related Search

A Roundup Of New U.S. Government Search Tools, Gary Price, Search Engine Land (Jan 30)

For researchers seeking out US government data, this list of very specialized US government-related search engines may be useful.

One on the list is Global Think Tank Directory - it lists organizations that deal with public policy. There are several listed by province for Canada. Find this under North America, and look for a small forward arrow to page through.

CI Resource Guide

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Completely Updated - December 2011, Sabrina Pacifici, LLRX

Updated guide to resources for researchers seeking business information and competitive intelligence from a US point of view. Resources are organized by type and use. A good orientation to types of tools.

Business News Studies

Those who manage access to news sources in organizaions will be interested in a report prepared by Robin Neidorf - the Freepint Research Report: Survey on News Needs and Preferences 2011 just published.

"Business news drives business decisions. Any environmental change – marketplace, competitive, financial or other – has the potential to create change in a business. Organisations access news through a wide range of paid-for and free sources, and information managers face an enormous challenge in understanding the full portfolio of news sources so that they can manage them efficiently and cost-effectively.

Over the past 4 years, FreePint Research has undertaken a survey to understand the decision-making process and priorities of information managers in reviewing, acquiring and managing the many sources of news that enter their organisations."

There is a relatively modest license fee.

Freepint is also offering a Buyer's Guide On Business News Information at no cost. Request your copy here.

LinkedIn for Company Information

5 Tips for Using the New LinkedIn Company Pages, Social Media Examiner (Nov 18)

People looking for jobs through LinkedIn or doing company research will want to know what companies can do with their LinkedIn pages - "Up until now, your company page existed in isolation. Now businesses can update their individual company pages to enable their followers to receive updates and insights about job opportunities, company news, employee moves and more."

And Social Media Examiner wants to help --

"There are some great resources from Social Media Examiner for building a business presence on Facebook and Twitter, and both of these networks are essential for positioning your business and engaging your community. Now you can extend the reach of your business with your LinkedIn company page to grow your influence as the industry expert!"

BizResearch Blog

BizResearch - blog of business research news, tips, facts and sources from the
Library research team at the London Business School Library.

Archives go back to January 2011. Covers large number of topical areas: advertising, business ethics, careers, communications, emerging markets - and so much more.

Mentioned in BestBizWeb Enewsletter - free subscription.

Adding Value as an Information Professional

Great webinar from Factiva on the The True Value of Information.

Mary Ellen Bates is the presenter - she demolishes the belief that most top business sources are available for free on the web (in 2010 only 39% of sources, and only 31% of the archives were free online); and exposes that "personalized" news search results at Google are hiding what you want, and that the research techniques are limited - two of many reasons to turn to the for-fee online information services.

She also guides information professionals in how to tell their story of the value of the work, and to find more ways to create value from the information collected.

Recommended. This is a BrightTalk webcast. Must register to view. Worth the hour.

World News Network has global coverage

Local newspapers and television stations are notoriously poor at reporting on world affairs and events - and the online aggregators at Google and Yahoo often customize to your location as well. World News Network aggregates news in 49 languages from sources around the world.

There is a strong taxonomy to support topical groupings for entertainment, science (which has subtopics environment and pollution), technology, sport, and business. There is a particularly excellent view by industry at WNIndustry.

The source is shown for each article along with the indexing providing readers a way to get a quick view of main topics and to find more.

Through Worldwide, you can drill down to a country. The Canada page is diappointing - with content drawn mainly from non-Canadian sources - such as a report on the end to the Canadian postal strike from the New York Times. But with some digging you'll also see Canada Newswire, CBC, Canoe. And it may be the one place to get a view of Canada as others see it.

The Advanced Search has several aids - auto-complete for suggested searches, time range choices, search query options for matches. A search on quebec sovereignty did pull in articles from as far back as 1999.

World News Network was a selected site in The Information Advisor's BestBizWeb Enewsletter for June 2011. Subscription is free.

Highbeam Business Blog

HighBeam Business Launches New Business Blog, Newsbreaks (Jun 20)

"HighBeam Business, part of Cengage Learning, announced the launch of its new business blog, “Arrive Prepared,” which features a steady stream of dialog on news coverage of the latest industry trends, Fortune 100 companies, business articles, and how-to guides. It aims to be the one-stop blog for sales, marketing, finance, and legal professions who need breaking insights to effectively communicate with their clients."

Resource Guide for CI

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Updated and Revised March 2011 by Sabrina I. Pacifici, LLRX (Mar 12)

Here is a revised version of Pacifici's extensive resource guide to CI. There are some search engines listed in Web search that I wouldn't bother to use (Allplus is a much better meta search engine than Metacrawler, and Exalead is no match for the larger search engiines in winnowing out spam). Adding Blekko is a good choice.

Finding companies throug LinkedIn

Discover the new LinkedIn Company Search, Brad Mauney, Linkedin BLog (Feb 25)

Linkedin added a new company search. See posting for details and video.

"Now you can search for companies not only by attributes such as location, industry, and size but also by how you are connected. You can filter a set of results to include only those companies where you have a direct connection or broaden your search to include companies in your extended network."

Social Media for business research

7 sites for information on businesses and organisations, Pandia (Dec 27, 2010)

Any type of business research - as consumer, company, or competitor - should cinclude social media sites among the resources: Linked IN, Twitter, You Tube, SLideshare, Facebook.

Kassel on researching US Private Companies

US Private Companies: Research and Analysis , Amelia Kassel, FUMSI (Dec 1)

Expert business searcher Amelia Kassel shares some techniques for researching private companies in the United States.

"By using a range of sources you can paint a picture of a company's solvency and answer essential questions. Without public disclosure, however, information must be sleuthed, pieced together and, at times, extrapolated"

It takes patience, skill, knowledge, and experience.

Options at Google Finance

Google Finance adds oodles of options, Google Finance Blog (Jul 20)

Google Finance added puts and calls.

Northern Light adds vendor literature

Northern Light Adds New IT Content for SinglePoint Research Portals, Newsbreaks (Jun 10)

"Northern Light announced the immediate availability of a new content collection for SinglePoint strategic research portals, comprising more than 20,000 publicly-available information technology (IT) vendor white papers and case studies. The literature, distilled from the websites of 800 leading IT vendors, is full-text indexed by Northern Light so relevant documents can be highlighted and linked to in the integrated search results generated by a SinglePoint user's research query. The vendor white papers and case studies augment an already extensive repository of IT industry information available to SinglePoint subscribers, including research reports from nearly 80 IT industry analyst firms, and hundreds of IT industry news and commentary from traditional media and industry authority blogs."

Using Google Trends

Search in Big Communication Trouble, by Stephen E. Arnold, Beyond Search (June 6)

Fascinating use of Google Trends to assess interest in "enterprise search" - low, judging from the infrequent use of the phrase by searchers. "business intelligence" does better. Carry on looking at "knowledge management", taxonomies etc.

New Hoover's

Hoover’s Launches New Platform and Nearly Doubles Coverage , Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Mar 15)

New platform at Hoover's.

"Hoover's (www.hoovers.com), the well-known online resource for reliable company and industry information, has launched a new platform that is designed to appeal to both its subscribers and its advertising partners. Users now experience an improved site design and benefit from enhanced functionality, but they also have access to nearly twice as many companies and people worldwide-now more than 65 million enterprises and 85 million professional contacts globally. The new platform architecture also allows Hoover's to introduce a new advertising platform that offers a wider range of ad sizes with an increased level of targeting and placement."

Using University Business Research Guides

Getting Educated Before You Search, Mary Ellen Bates, Bates Info (Feb 2010)

Always good advice from Mary Ellen Bates, master researcher. Her secret is asking others - especially other librarians.

"Most large university libraries create resource guides or "pathfinders" to help students find information on frequently-requested topics. Business libraries are great sources for tools for conducting research in a specific industry."

Points to some business research guides in the US.

What about Canada? Rotman Business Information Centre at University of Toronto has this guide to industry information. (May 2009) and on Investment information (OCt 2009)

Want more? Run a search at Google, Yahoo, Bing for site: business research guides - eg site:utoronto.ca industry research guides - or other words to describe the kind of research guide you need.

Guides to US Business Research

Two research guides for business researchers.

Searching for Company Information, New York Public Library

Researching Public Companies Through EDGAR: Guide for Investors, U.S. Securities Exchange Commission

Zillman's Business Intelligence List

Business Intelligence Online Resources, By Marcus P. Zillman, LLRX, Published on February 3, 2010

Partially annotated list of resources you can use for business intelligence or business research.

The annotated part looks good. The "comprehensive business intelligence link compilation" has some dead wood in it - I wouldn't bother using Altavista or Alltheweb as search engines - they use the Yahoo database and haven't been upgraded for years. Teoma goes to Ask Answers and I doubt that it will have much for business intelligence. But others are worth checking - pick the ones you can use for your bookmark collection.

Financial Information at Bing

Bing Debuts In-Depth Stock Pages, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jan 28)

"Bing has announced a new “Stocks and Funds page” that offers in-depth information for users following or doing research related to stocks and finances."

Enter a ticker in the search box e.g MSFT to get quotes and links to financial information.

Only works on the US Bing, and for US stocks.

Google Finance adds news

Google adds streaming news to Google Finance by Tom Krazit, Webware (Dec 4)

"On the main Google Finance page, users can now click on a news tab that brings up what appears to be a constantly updated Google News-powered stream of news stories related to the general market or specific portfolios set up as part of a profile."

Look for Market News.

Guide for Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Updated and Revised October 2009 by Sabrina Pacifici (Oct 11)

This terrific guide to tools to use for competitive intelligence has been updated. It is geared to US researchers, but others will get value from the sections on general search, news search, blogs, some business, and the for-fee collection.

+ Selected Search Engines for Web, Blogs, Video, News and Alerts
+ Selected Business Info Websites, Databases, Blogs - Fee and Free
+ Selected Online People Tracking Sources
+ Television and Radio News Transcripts
+ Legislative Monitoring and Tracking
+ E-Newsletters, Online Newspapers, Journals and News Sources
+ Monitoring Trends, Companies and Products
+ Selected RSS Feeds From Business Related News
+ Identification of Company Legal Representation
+ Online Tools for Competitor Monitoring
+ Westlaw Watch and Lexis Trackers
+ Benchmarking and Country Profiles
+ CI Pathfinders and Link Collections
+ Web Directories and Portals
+ Website Trackers

There are a few general search tools on the list that I think are tired (Surfwax, Metacrawler and a couple of others), but generally this is a good guide for types of resources to use.

To the search section I would add allplus.com or its sibling polymeta.com for a metasearch that does topical analysis.

Yahoo vs Google Finance

Where Yahoo Leaves Google in the Dust, by RANDALL STROSS, Digital Domain (Aug 22)

Judging by traffic, Yahoo Finance is better than Google Finance. This article compares the two.

Conclusion: "It seems unlikely, however, that Google’s new tools — whose metrics include one called the Fast Stochastic Oscillator — will do as much for building traffic as a fluffy news story or a short video featuring talking heads. Yahoo understands that a free finance site prospers by drawing less from the world of mathematics and more from the world of entertainment, informing just enough to satisfy users without setting off an anxiety attack."

Finance Addons for iGoogle

10 iGoogle gadgets for tracking financial data by Don Reisinger, Webware (Aug 4)

"If you're one of those people trying to make sense of the markets, you might be happy to know that instead of jumping from site to site to get all your financial information, you can simply add some gadgets to your iGoogle home page. From currencies to commodities, iGoogle gadgets will satisfy any desire."

Hoover's adds LinkedIn

Hoover’s Integrates LinkedIn Contacts, Information Today (Apr 20)

LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals, just got all the recognition it will ever need -- "Hoover's, Inc. (www.hoovers.com), a D&B company, announced it has added LinkedIn contact data to its subscriber site. This new addition provides seamless integration between Hoover's information on 31 million companies and 37 million people with LinkedIn's professional network of business contacts (www.linkedin.com)."

The Search Process

Filling in the Gaps: Company Intelligence Beyond the Corporate Website , by Sarah Hinton, FUMSI (March 2009)

Good advice in this article - particularly the point that much depends upon words.

"There are useful search phrases which help to generate interesting results on topics such as company strategy or product innovation. With this sort of search I've even found, on occasions, that the oft-avoided route - taking the plunge and entering just what you want to find into Google - can work surprisingly well.

But, most of the time, the search involves playing around with your keywords, bearing in mind the context of what's required ... "

The article links to others on the same theme and also excellent. One to note is Key to Research Success: Asking the Right Questions by Jane John

Guide to CI Resources

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Updated and Revised March 2009 by Sabrina Pacifici, LLRX.com (Mar 28, 2009)

This excellent guide to resources was first published in March 2006 and receives two updates a year from the indefatigable Sabrina Pacific. It's hard to keep these resource compilation entirely fresh. This is a good starting point for leads on trackers, online news, rss feeds, competitor monitoring.

Northern Light's MIAnalyst

Northern Light Boosts Search Insight With Launch of MI Analyst 3.0 by Paula J. Hane, Newbreaks (Mar 26)

Northern Light has made further advances in employing "meaning extraction" technology to identify facets to a topic. Some of this can be seen at its free business news search site nlsearch.com - run the search, note the folders, and click on MI Analyst for more analysis.

Northern Light has improved MI Analyst in version 3.0 to show concepts related to the documents - issues, companies etc. This version is available to subscribers.

From the review:

"MI Analyst applies text analytics optimized for market intelligence applications to search results. MI Analyst goes beyond the extraction of just nouns-people, places, things, etc. It uses advanced text analytics technologies to provide entity extraction for key business facets, relationship identification between entities, sentiment scoring, meaning extraction, and trend analysis."

LiveWire in VIP for Info Pros

News from Gary Price that he posted to ResourceShelf

"I’ve expanded my role with FreePint, the publisher of ResourceShelf, to include vendor and product coverage for VIP, particularly the LiveWire (http://web.vivavip.com/forum/LiveWire/ ). You can find industry comment on the LiveWire from VIP’s team of contributing editors.

Get a weekly digest of headlines emailed by subscribing to the LiveWire Digest: http://www.vivavip.com/order/digest/"

Good to follow.

Newssift for Business News

Financial Times Launches Newssift, A Business News Search Engine by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Mar 18)

Newssift - a new business news engine in test that uses semantic technologies.

"Currently indexing thousands of news sources worldwide, and with millions of articles in its database, Newssift aims to bring context and meaning that its creators say is missing from traditional keyword-based business news search engines."

Very faceted: "Users can refine queries across multiple search options, such as Topic, Organization, Place, Person, and Theme/Keyword (see the gray area at top). Below the suggestions, Newssift’s search results include additional context, such as the ability to refine results by Sentiment and/or Article Sources (see pie charts on left)."

Eg sentiment meter for American International Group

Prospect Research Story

Research: A Strategy for Raising $1 Million by Margaret King, FUMSI (Feb 2009)

Describes the process for researching for fund raising purposes. Involved close analysis of keyterms and the language used by potential funders.

Good Tipples

Favourite Tipples at Freepint in March , were picked by Christine Hamilton-Pennell - an interesting mix of CI, data visualization, Pipl for people search, and business and trade sources.

Christine Hamilton-Pennell is President of Growing Local Economies , Inc. in Canada. She wrote Canadian Business Research Resources, published in November 2008 through FUMSI.

Financial Resource Guide

A Searcher’s Journey Through a Morass: Researching the Financial Crisis by Stephen Fadel, Business Reference Librarian, Fogler Library, University of Maine, Searcher (Feb 2009)

How would you go about creating a resource guide for students on the economic crises and bailouts? This was the topic that Stephen Fadel tackled using a book catalog, CQ Researcher, Congressional Research Service Reports for the US plus Canada’s Library of Parliament Research Publications and Britain’s House of Commons Library Research Papers, news sites, and friends and listservs. Fadel then delivers his findings in this article.
current bailout/economic issue

Patent Search for SMEs

Powerful Patent Search Service Created, Science Daily (Jan 20)

Innovall - "cost effective" service for searching patent databases.

"A European project has created a powerful patent search service for SMEs. It is a major step forward as patents and patent information are extremely valuable."

XooxleAnswers - Research Resource

XooxleAnswers has an annotated directory (or link list) to free newspaper archives starting with a description of Google News Archives. This is an extensive list that covers the US, some international including Canada, college newspapers, and magazines. It received a strong recommendation from The Information Advisor's BestBizWeb's enewsletter.

XooxleAnswers (zooks-il answers) is the home website for David Sarokin, a researcher who offers for-fee services. He used to research for Google Answers, and also writes articles for eHow.com about research, computers, investing and much else.

He has created several useful guides to resources for legal and business, and links to articles he has written on a variety of topics.

For example, see David's article on Find Old Newspaper Articles and Archives Online for Free (Nov 2008)

In total, this is an excellent resource to help one go well beyond Google for specialty searches, and as a for-fee service to be helped on the really tough questions.

It Pays to Pay for Market Research

Free Data: Turning It into Something Worth Paying For by David Gudgin, FUMSI (Nov 2008)

David Gudgin, Sales and Marketing Director at Euromonitor International plc, argues persuasively that paying for market intelligence data is worth it. Free sources from governments of business information websites are not necessarily comparable, reliable, or complete.

"Key questions to ask of your information sources are:

* What are the data sources? Are they reliable?
* Are categories and methodologies clearly defined?
* Can data be compared across countries?
* Why are there gaps in the data? Can they be filled?"

The article shows how Euromonitor International handles each of these in its macro-economic research.

Dow Jones Factiva Webinar on the Business Researcher

The Evolving Role of the Business Researcher: A Dow Jones Research Study, ON-DEMAND Recording of a session from Dow Jones (Oct 16, 2008) about its study, Research the Researcher.

Dow Jones presents key findings in this one hour webinar where we will share key findings from this research project. "Product Manager, Ken Sickles and Market Research Manager, Ellen Maccabe will discuss the results of our research and how emerging technologies, organizational trends, and end user expectations are impacting the way researchers work."

Pre-recorded on October 16, 2008.

More from Deep Web Tech

Deep Web Tech Dives Into Vertical Search Portals by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Nov 13)

Paula Hane provides background on Deep Web Technologies and its work to create federated search engines (or portals - depending on your preference) that address specific information interests - business, medicine, science.

Biznar scans business sites, blogs, news, patent sources, and has received favourable reviews from Bob Berkman. Mednar is for medical research. This searches many US national health sites plus Google Scholar (interesting).

Deep Web provides the technology for Scitopia.org, Science.gov, WorldWIdeScience.org, U.S. Department of Defence search.

Accoona to be Revived

B2B Search Engine Accoona Acquired by Masterseek, Bill Hartzer (Nov 5)

Accoona is to be relaunched by Masterseek. Accoona was a business search engine - picked up information on companies and people and had some ability to identify entities in the text - that closed a few weeks ago. Few mourned the loss.

"With the acquisition of Accoona, Masterseek will fortify itself in its fight to become one of the largest B2B search engines in the world. The acquisition means that Masterseek will improve its company data and at the same time significantly increase the number of its users."

Biznar for Business Research

Biznar is a business research engine from Deep Web Technologies. Biznar chooses the sources and deeply indexes them. Results are clustered into topics, date range, and variety of facets. It has a starring system for rating quality. You can also set up an alert on the search.

There are some controls. Advanced search allows limiting to Blogs, Business Research, News, or Government info in total or to specific sources. Government info is only EDGAR-SEC in the US and patent databases. In Business Research has Gartner, Forrester, CIO and many more.

Can also sort by date, title, author, or ranking. There is a button to show status of results from a source - number of hits returned, timeout.

This is an impressive business research engine in sources used and the topical treatment. Only complaint is the slow speed.

Research Through Social Networking

Social Networking: A Research Tool , by Amelia Kassel, Freepint (Sept 2008)

"Dozens of social networking sites have given rise to potentially useful information that can be included in the information professional's toolkit."

CI for Small Businesses

Finding Competitive Information for Growing Companies by Christine Hamilton-Pennell, FUMSI (June 2008)

"While the needs of new and growing businesses vary depending upon a number of factors (regulatory environment, workforce availability, basic infrastructure and available capital, to name a few), some information needs are similar across all types of small businesses in all locations. This article addresses these common needs and identifies free and low-cost sources of business information from an international perspective."

Top Financial News and Research Sites

Yahoo! Finance Ranks as Top Financial News & Research Site in the U.S. with More than 18 Million Visitors in May, According to comScore, Press Release (July 9)

Chart shows Top Financial News and Research Sites in the US - May 2007 v May 2008.

+ Yahoo Finance well in the lead with over 18 million unique users in May 2008 from a total of 64 million.
+ AOL Money and Finance - 15.2 m
+ MSN Money - 13.7 m

No Google Finance in the top 10.

Category Displays Robust 35 Percent Growth versus Year Ago Amidst Uncertainty in the U.S. Economy

Real time at Google Finance

Google Finance gets real-time NYSE ticker updates by By Josh Lowensohn, Webware (June 24)

Google Finance - real time quotels for NYSE

"Tuesday morning the New York Stock Exchange partnered with Google and CNBC to provide real-time stock quotes that will show up on Google's finance site."

Research Needs of Entrepreneurs

Finding Competitive Information for Growing Companies Christine Hamilton-Pennell, FUMSI (June 2008)

Tackles how to serve the research needs of early-stage entrepreneurs concerning competitors, markets, customers, industry.

"... examine sources of information that can address these research needs. This round-up of resources is not exhaustive; rather it is meant to suggest a basic approach and starting point for conducting more in-depth research in each area. The focus is on information available through the Web, but keep in mind that public and university libraries have a wealth of resources that are often available for free to business owners."

Mentions many excellent resources as the starting point for this research including several from Canada.

Christine Hamilton-Pennell Founder and President of Growing Local Economies (www.growinglocaleconomies.com), a company that provides training, consulting and research to communities developing local entrepreneurship support initiatives.

This articles was mentioned in Competitive Research for Small Businesses, The Virtual CHase, along with a reference to Genie Tyburski's Company Information Guide.

Accoona now a B2B

Accoona, Once Pretender to Search Throne... Now Niche B2B Service by Richard MacManus, Read Write Web (Jun 19)

Accoona, which has been trying to be search engine for business users, is cutting back to business directory search and news search. Both still have the SuperTarget tools for refining the search - certainly Accoona's best feature.

News search has some merit. There are many Canadian sources - newspapers, magazines, networks, trade magazines. See them in this search on nuclear energy ontario

Pandia interview with David Seuss

Free business news search engine from Northern Light Pandia (May

David Seuss, CEO of Northern Light, describes the free business news search engine at NLsearch, and the customized business research SinglePoint.

Key difference between the two: "NLSearch.com is an excellent business news research tool, but by itself it’s not a comprehensive market intelligence resource — that’s what SinglePoint is."

Advantages of NLsearch: 1) "business and industry news from thousands of business news sources"; 2) "powerful analytical tools to determine what information is contained in the documents on a search results list".

Future of Search -- boils down to content, social, and meaning -- "in-depth understanding of the searched body of knowledge and associated ways of knowing."

Finding Small Business Owners

Finding Out Who Owns a Small Business by Genie Tyburski, The Virtual Chase (May 5)

Addresses how to find the name of the owner of a small private company in the United States.

"There are a number of resources and research strategies for finding business owners. I'll outline several methods, starting with relatively easy approaches and free sources of information. Then I'll suggest several harder-to-accomplish tactics that still utilize free sources and I'll end by mentioning some commercial databases."

Google Finance

Google Finance gets update, and people hate it by Garett Rogers, ZDNet (Apr 24)

New version of Google Finance has a very busy page that will take time to get used to. True for Google Finance Canada as well.

"Last night Google rolled out a fresh new version of Google Finance, and instantly people went on the offensive by attacking everything from the organization of data to the font being too small. Some have even accused it of being too “Yahoo!”."

Guide to Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide by Sabrina Pacifici, LLRX (Apr 4)

Complete revision of an excellent guide to wide variety of tools for searching and tracking. This was first published in Nov 2005.

The guide is one big page - scroll to see it all, or use the internal page links. The link for Selected RSS was broken when I used it. Either scroll down or use http://www.llrx.com/features/ciguide.htm#selectedrss

Company Information in New Places

New Resources for Company Information by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Apr 3)

Business information - company profiles directory style - is becoming available in very new ways and places through innovative partnerships and initiatives.

"The professional networking site LinkedIn has added a company directory, and a new company still in beta, TradeVibes, is working to build a user-generated database of company information."

Linkedin is working with BusinessWeek.com and Capital IQ, a unit of Standard & Poors, to provide its 20 million members, 160,000 company profiles. Businessweek is also added a Company Insider feature.

Tradevibes works on a wiki principle - people add the information - it "specializes in up-to-date information about private companies and serves as a tool for finding and sharing news and opinions about companies"

A New Northern Light

Northern Light Readies New Free Business Search Engine by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Mar 27)

Here is truly exciting news for business researchers -- Northern Light, which has been operating mainly as a for-fee business research service, is going to become free. Northern Light was much loved by researchers in the late 1990s for its early leadership in organizing search results into folders and orientation to business information. For various reasons it closed its public Web search engine and specialized in enterprise search needs.

Beginning in April, Northern Light will be available at nlsearch.com as a business search engine. Newsbreaks has the full story.

Paula Hane describes the range of content, the use of "meaning extraction", and addition of social search features.

"In addition to searching the best of the web’s business news sources and blogs, the new Northern Light Search now provides text analytics and "meaning extraction" capabilities from Northern Light’s MI Analyst application, formerly only available to the company’s enterprise clients. It also offers some collaborative social computing features, such as Market Intelligence Wikis."

"Northern Light Search is open for free to all users. Registration is only required to take advantage of the advanced functionality, such as Saved Searches and Alerts, Expert Searches, contributing to the Market Intelligence Wikis, and saving user preferences. Seuss says the free search engine serves as an open and freely available presentation of the company’s capabilities for potential enterprise customers. "And, if a lot of people use it, we can sell ads," he says."

New Features at Factiva

Flurry of Free Features From Dow Jones Factiva by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks ( Mar 11)

Barbara Quint spoke with poke with Brigitte Ricou-Bellan, manager of destination solutions, and Julia Mair, executive director of solutions marketing, at Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group (www.solutions.dowjones.com), about new features at Factiva.

+ de-duping alerts and search results
+ audio versions created through text to speech conversion
+ Newsletter Builder -- "Newsletter Builder as a wizard to design their own templates and create HTML-formatted newsletters easily without needing knowledge of CSS, HTML, or other programming languages."

Guides to Industry Research

The British Library offers industry guides for research business information. These are pdf publications that list print sources, journals, and web sites. These are written as guides to British Library resources, but the sharp researcher could find the print reference in a local library and possibly arrange access to an online commercial database. Orientation is to the UK and EU.

http://www.bl.uk/collections/business/bisheets.html

"These industry guides will give you details of sources to check for suppliers, competitors, the market and news on your chosen area of business. Each industry guide includes lists of printed and Internet sources. Most of the printed sources quoted can be accessed at the British Library - some shelfmarks appear in brackets after the title entry, please refer to the Integrated Catalogue for full details. Alternatively, some items may also be held in your local public library. "

Calling on Researchers

Thomson Scientific Tagging Researchers: ResearcherID.com by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Jan 21)

"Thomson Scientific (http://scientific.thomson.com) has opened up a new web service called ResearcherID.com (www.researcherid.com) that allows researchers to establish their own identities and, with some restrictions, to identify their writings. The service will soon open to outside sponsors, including universities, publishers, associations, etc., "via a standard Web Services API." Even in the few short weeks that the system has been open to invitees, James Pringle, vice president of product development at Thomson Scientific, says he has already seen some ResearcherID’s on Google search results."

Prospect Research

FreePint has a new service called FUMSI - for people who "Find, Use, Manage and Share Information". It publishes articles, tools, and a monthly magazine, to provide practical guidance in using and finding information.

In the January issue, Matt Ide writes about Prospect Research: Finally Coming of Age

Describes the work of researchers in the charity sector who do research to identify potential donors or funders, and provides tips and a list of resources for prospect researchers. One of these is Ide's own fResource with "600 resources, both free and subscription, that provide information on everything from finding addresses, postcodes and telephone numbers, right through to corporate databases, rich lists, news sites and publications."

Edgar Search Tutorial

How to Search the Edgar Database - tutorial from The Virtual Chase by Genie Tyburski (7 Dec)

"This 10-minute video explains how to use the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database. It covers both basic and advanced search features. You may use the table of contents to go directly to certain parts of the video, but this feature only works after the screencast loads completely."

Done with Camtasia

The New AOL Money

AOL Launches New Money & Finance Site, Powered By Relegence Search Engine by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Nov 28)

Major redesign of AOL Money and Finance - http://money.aol.com/. Intends to compete with Yahoo Finance.

Does have Canadian stock exchanges but the data looks incomplete to me on Shoppers Drug Mart. You can create your own portfolio.

If you go to money.aol.ca you get the message - "the money channel is not yet available".

Five Top Business Research Sources

My Favourite Tipples from Mary Ellen Bates and Amelia Kassel, Freeping (Nov 8)

Five favourite business and company research sources from two experts in business research. Includes Country Insights from the Canadian Centre for Intercultural Learning,

Presentation on Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence on a Shoestring By Sabrina I. Pacifici and Susan Armstrong, LLRX, Published on October 30, 2007

PDF presentation: techniques, processes, services for CI research in the US and Canada.

Yahoo Finance Search

Look Closely: New Yahoo Finance Page Continues to Offer “Finance Only” Search ResourceShelf (Oct 16)

Yahoo Finance has a new look and it still has Finance Search - top bar, right beside Symbol Lookup.

Knuro BlogWatch

Business Search Engine Knuru.com Announces Release of Knuru BlogWatch, Enterprise Search (Jul 13)

"Knuru.com, a business information search engine, has announced the release of Knuru BlogWatch. Knuru BlogWatch, used in conjunction with Knuru’s Contextual News, is designed to provide real-time online monitoring of blogs worldwide."

Knuro provides natural language search of selected news resources. It also partners with Ask.com (UK) for Web results.

Business Information Resources Changing

"Business Information Trends: Locking Down and Opening Up Content" By Pam Foster, Freepint (Aug 9)

Foster covers many topics of interest to the business researcher in this article.

+ information companies Hoover's, McGraw Hill (Business Week) and ZoomInfo have been adding to what they provide for free.

+ it's getting more difficult to obtain embargoed research through intermediaries. The brokers are selling directly rather than through services like Investext.

+ there's more linguistic analysis / text mining of news to spot patterns, trends, sentiment. Specifically, Reuters is using Corpora. There are others.

+ Lots of merger activity.

Google Finance Canada

Google Finance in Canada - for real, Google Blog (Jul 31)

Good news for Canadians - there is a Canadian version of Google Finance.

It claims to have:

" * Top financial news from Canadian sources
* Search with a preference for Canadian companies
* Front-page high level economic data from the Bank of Canada
* Portfolios in Canadian currency (or the currency of your choice)
* Equity data from the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX Venture Exchange, and Canadian mutual funds "

I still see many non-Canadian sources but it is a start.

It is very easy to search on a company - simply start typing the name and Google will find the ticker symbol and provide the profile, news stories, and summary.

This means that Canadians can keep a portfolio of stocks, but I don't see a way to add these to iGoogle.

Market intelligence

Northern Light Introduces SinglePoint 4.0, Newsbreaks (Jul 16)

"Northern Light (www.northernlight.com) introduced SinglePoint 4.0, the latest release of its hosted market research portal and content integration application for enterprises. SinglePoint provides centralized search, analysis, and access for diverse sources of market intelligence. Northern Light aggregates all targeted content daily for each SinglePoint client—internal primary research, licensed secondary sources, and other licensed material—indexes it, and makes it available for unified access."

Knuru Blogwatch

Business Search Engine Knuru.com Announces Release of Knuru BlogWatch, EContent (Jul 13)

"Knuru.com, a business information search engine, has announced the release of Knuru BlogWatch. Knuru BlogWatch, used in conjunction with Knuru’s Contextual News, is designed to provide real-time online monitoring of blogs worldwide. Using proprietary technology designed for accelerated data extraction, Knuru BlogWatch enables customers to monitor blogs to serve their business intelligence needs. "

Also - New Business Search Engine Knuru.com Announces Release of Knuru BlogWatch, DMN Newswire

"In order to access Knuru BlogWatch, users will need to perform a search query using natural language search. Once this has been done, users will be given the option to view results from the following tabs: Strategic, News, BlogWatch and Ask. Click on the BlogWatch tab to access the weblog database. "

CI Resource Guide

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide By Sabrina I. Pacifici, LLRX (June 25, 2007) -- Update to a popular guide - has tools and resources for search, news, people, business, US government, countries, web trackers.

Approaches for CI

"Beyond Online: In-Depth Report from SLA" by Shirl Kennedy, Freepint (June 28)

Reports on a three-part session at the SLA 2007 Conference - 'Beyond Online' - on approaches for collecting competitive intelligence - attending conferences, watching patents, and learning from the company's sales force.

Tutorials for Business Search

BizWiki by the Ohio University Libraries has tutorials on how to perform business research on popular business sources. These are done as screencasts - watch how to use the tools Hoovers, TradeStats, Reference USA, Mergent Online, Business Source Complete.

SinglePoint Market Research Portal

Northern Light Launches MI Analyst by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (May 7)

"Northern Light (www.northernlight.com), the provider of search technologies and business research content, has just introduced MI Analyst, a new application designed to speed and improve the analysis of market research content. It is offered as an add-on option to the company’s SinglePoint enterprise market research portals."

ZoomInfo Business Search

ZoomInfo Retools Its Business Info Search, SEW Blog (Apr 2)

"Business information search engine ZoomInfo has retooled its offering to create a single user interface for its various products. The new search engine gives one view of data on companies, people and jobs, which are crawled by ZoomInfo and organized semantically based on the relationship the data has to a company or person."

The new CIO.com site

IDG's CIO.com Launches Redesign of Website, Business Wire (Apr 2)

More signs of the times with changes at CIO.com. "The new site, categorized into five sections, adopts an entirely new content strategy geared at expanding the traditional community and creating expert resources from within the community. CIO.com is the first B-to-B website to adopt this model."

The five sections are How-To, Advice & Opinion, Research & Analysis, News and Careers.

It also uses a Google Custom Search and has a new taxonomy, "covering eight categories: four leadership and four technology".

Business Information Trends

"Business Information Trends: The Times They Are a-Changin'", by Pam Foster, Freepint (Mar )

Examines changes at Thomson in the break up of their Business Intelligence services, and at Factiva, now owned 100% by Dow Jones. But most interestingly also talks about Second Life - the virtual world - where companies are setting up presences.

"The number of organisations involved in Second Life grows each day and currently includes Reuters, Talis, IBM, Nissan, Wall Street Journal, Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, Sun Microsystems, Adidas, Toyota, American Apparel, MTV, US Centers for Disease Control, the State Library of Kansas and many others. For some, the benefits are in marketing, while others benefit from the ability to collaborate. IBM has 1,000 of its senior executives involved and is using Second Life as a mentoring community. The company has built a connection environment, a social- networking tool, where avatars profile themselves, then meet in Second Life."

Also comments on the strengths of traditional media for news, and the threats posed by digital.

ZoomInfo Powersearch

Business Information Search Engine ZoomInfo Unveils PowerSearch 2007, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Jan 30)

ZoomInfo has developed PowerSearch 2007 for conducting research on people, companies, and industries. "Subscription-based pricing starts at $3,950 per user per year."

"More than 1,500 customers currently benefit from the power of ZoomInfo's patented semantic search engine. The search engine continually crawls the Business Web - the millions of corporate Web sites, press releases, electronic news services, SEC filings and other online sources - then automatically aggregates and organizes the information into easy-to-digest and easy-to-search profiles."

Fate of Thomson Business Intelligence

Thomson Business Intelligence Dismantling by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Jan 22)

"Thomson Business Intelligence (TBI; www.thomsonbusinessintelligence.com), created from a 2005 reorganization of assets previously assigned to Dialog and reporting—somewhat oddly—to Thomson Legal & Regulatory (www.thomson.com/solutions/legal), has begun dismantling its operations and disposing of its products."

Competitive Intelligence Resources

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide By Sabrina I. Pacifici and Donna Cavallini. LLRX.com (Jan 17 2007) -- revised version of excellent resource guide to search tools, news sources and articles, RSS feeds, tracking tools, and pathfinders.

Yahoo Personal Finance

Yahoo to add personal finance content to site -- The Wall Street Journal, among others to provide stories -- Marketwatch (Jan 19)

Yahoo Finance will cover "money matters" also under Personal Finance.

" Among the content on the new section, which will mostly be provided by other sources, will be tips and tools for household budgeting, tax planning, careers, real estate and debt management, the AP said. The content providers will include The Wall Street Journal, The Motley Fool, Consumer Reports and CNNMoney.com."

Google Finance Competition

Google Revamps Finance "Struggling financial site gets redesign, new functions but faces tough competition." Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service via PC World (Dec 13)

Google Finance falls far behind Yahoo Finance (#1) and MSN Money (#2). Will the enhancements that allow more personalization and show more history help? Not in Canada - the Canadian exchanges aren't listed.

SEC Resources

An Overview of Selected SEC Resources on the Web, by Jan Bissett and Margi Heinen, LLRX (Dec 2006)

This is an update to an earlier column. "We offer this column on Securities and Exchange filings as well as selected guides to SEC research as a pathfinder to assist those who are challenged by the complexities of this area of the law."

Changes to Google Finance

New look to Google Finance page. Has market and sector summaries, news, top movers. Registered users can easily add stocks and other financial instruments to their portfolio. Only has US stock exchanges.

See Google Updates Google Finance Home Page, SearchEngineLand (Dec 12)

Frasers for Canadian B2B

Frasers Industrial Web Search -- Canada has a search engine for Canadian suppliers of industrial products and services thanks to Rogers Media.

Private Company Information at Hoover's

Hoover’s Expands Private Company Coverage, Newsbreaks (Nov 20)

"Hoover’s, Inc. (http://www.hoovers.com), a D&B company, announced the imminent expansion of its private company coverage with the release in early 2007 of additional data for the top 250,000 private companies in the U.S. ranked by total sales. This release will more than triple the number of private company records in Hoover’s database."

More at Northern Light

One Stop Business Web, KMWorld (Nov 9)

Northern Light has a new version of its Business Research Engine.

"Users of the Business Research Engine can browse the market intelligence centers (MIC), access featured reports and resources from the Web, and use the Business Web search without limitations, says the company."

Google Finance

Google Finance Adds Compare, Timeline & More Features, SEW Blog (Oct 23) - new features are also listed in the faq for Google Finance.

Enhanced Hoover's

Hoover’s Enhances Subscriber Offerings, EContent (Oct 24)

"Hoover's, Inc., a D&B company that provides information about industries, companies, and key decision makers, has announced the launch of Hoover's Premium Select, an enhancement to its suite of subscription offerings."

Competitive Intelligence Guide

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide, By Donna Cavallini and Sabrina I. Pacifici, LLRX (Oct 16)

Good listing of a multitude of tools including Website trackers.

Northern Light's Business Research Engine

Northern Light Debuts New Business Research Engine by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Sep 11)

Good news for business researchers. Northern Light has opened a Business Research Engine with free access to searching business content that includes a business web of 100 million pages and 22,000 sites, 3 million archived articles, and 1.3 million articles from more than 1,400 premium publications. Subscriber access to viewing the proprietary material is only $9.95 US / month.

"All visitors to the www.nlresearch.com site now have free access to the Business Web and can browse and search the proprietary business content for free. A subscription or a day pass—a new option with this version—is required to read articles from the journals and business news sources and to take advantage of advanced functionality such as Search Alerts, Public Alerts, and user preferences. The company hopes that access to the fairly extensive free search and editorial functionality—not to mention the lack of advertising, pop-ups, paid inclusions, or consumer content—will be an attractive enticement to subscribe."

Database of Sources at TVC

Database of Sources at The Virtual Chase has been completed. The Virtual Chase has excellent guides to doing company research and finding peopel

From the newsletter: "Released in beta during April of this year, the
database contains abstracts and links to Web-based sources of
information for conducting research on companies or people and for
finding legal or factual information. You may browse the database by
subject or search it by keyword. The old research guides will remain available for some time, but we will no longer update them."

Yahoo Finance

Yahoo Finance gets a face-lift, by Elinor Mills, CNet (July 16)

Yahoo Finance received a substantial upgrade for the first time in 5 years "with new interactive stock charts, improved message boards and business-related video clips from content partners."

Yahoo finance gets new look at Blogma (July 17)

Zoomlist

The Zoom List (Beta): An Autonomously Built Directory of Companies, Products and Services from ZoomInfo, ResourceShelf (June 27) - reviews the new Zoomlist directory of companies, products and services from Zoominfo.

Free Content for Business Research

"Trends in business information, provision and use", By Pam Foster, Freepint (May 1)

One of the trends is that "Content is increasingly being given away for free". Article has several examples - Highbeam Research has about 3,000 sources some of which are free; Congoo is a search engine that picks up premium sources of business information; Google Finance has North American stocks but is expected to be extended to cover Europe.

Free Publications at Statistics Canada

Access to Statistics Canada's electronic publications at no charge, Statistics Canada (Apr 5)

"Effective April 24, all electronic publications on Statistics Canada's Web site will be available free of charge." ... "his latest move makes available at no charge more than 150 electronic publications for which fees were previously charged."

Google Finance Ho Hum

Thumbs-down for Google Finance, by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (Mar 21) -- Francisco is not impressed with Google Finance -- "... Google Finance -- with its perfunctory quotes, news headlines, charts and the like -- is not terribly impressive, partly because it looks so much like other finance sites created years ago, notably Yahoo Finance."

Competitive Intelligence

LLRX.com has two articles on Competitive Intelligence (Mar 25)

Analyze This: The Evolution of Competitive Intelligence Products for the Legal Profession, By Donna Cavallini. The article is about ALM Research, "... the primary source for actual law firm financial data for all of the major U.S. and international law firms, including the Am Law 100, the Am Law 200, the NLJ 250 and the Global 100, and the release of its annual lists and rankings are eagerly awaited by the legal community."

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide (Updated) By Donna Cavallini and Sabrina I. Pacifici.

Google Finance Beta

Google launches free financial news website Marketwatch (Mar 21) -- Google has created its own Google Finance website that has features similar to Yahoo Finance and others - quotes, charts, news etc, to which it has added some of its own like entries from blogs.

"Google Finance offers similar features to its rivals – share quotes and charts, integrated financial news from its Google News service, discussion groups and the ability for investors to create personalised portfolios of their share holdings.

It also introduces innovations. The interactive charts will map market data with news stories, so the effect of announcements can be tracked against the stock performance. The charts can also be dragged dynamically using a scroll bar through different time periods. "

Coverage is mainly of public companies in North America, although Google has picked up some information on private companies through partnerships and crawling.

The front page shows only the American exchanges but the database does have data from the Toronto Stock Exchange. You will find Canadian Tire here.

You can still run a search on a company ticker symbol to get figures quickly and links to Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, Marketwatch, CNN Money, and Reuters, as well as the new Google Finance. See this example for Microsoft - mfst.

Also see Danny Sullivan's review in SearchDay - Google Launches Google Finance (March 21)

The New Nexis

The New Look of Nexis by Marydee Ojala, Newsbreaks (Mar 13) -- LexisNexis has released a "new Nexis" (http://www.nexis.com) for business and legal researchers. This is a new "global platform" adopted to standardize the content and look and feel across all markets. The hope is that the new Nexis appeals a broader set of users than the customary information professionals. Migration will take place over the coming year.

Of interest: Nexis employs categorization to aid in discovery, and clustering.

"The new Nexis contains more than 32,000 sources from which customers can pick and choose. What normalizes the content is the categorization—that’s its value-add. Rector is proud that the new Nexis “is designed to help discovery.” It’s not just about doing a search, but discovering things unknown to the searcher. Leveraging LexisNexis SmartIndexing is an important component of this discovery—and normalization—process."

"The new Nexis makes use of clustering technology, which is similar to that employed by Web search engines such as Vivisimo, but it’s less problematic, since it works from controlled vocabulary, rather than algorithms applied to nonindexed Web pages. This clustering is particularly important because it can reveal aspects of a search term the researcher had not considered. It both disambiguates the terms and suggests types of coverage of the topic. Categories include source type, source name, subject, industry, company, geography, or language."

Hoovers' Beta

The New Hoover's: Simple. Comprehensive. Unified., by Deborah A. Liptak, Newsbreaks (Mar 6) -- "Simple and elegant, Hoover’s new beta interface ( http://beta.hoovers.com ) evokes the “Power of Simplicity” in this 21st century Web site makeover. " This site is for paid subscribers. The free Hoovers is unchanged.

Market Research Sources

"Purchasing and using market research services: some starting points on the Web", By David Mort, Freepint (Mar 3) - Has advice and resources for people who need to buy market research or commission a new study.

CI Tools

Got Competitive Intelligence? Tips, Tools, Techniques for the Savvy Marketer by Donna Cavallini and Sabrina I. Pacifici, LLRX.com (Feb 2006). Updated guide to resources for researching companies, people and markets and for monitoring news and trends. Legal resources listed are for the U.S. Excellent for people doing business research, prospecting, and competitive intelligence. Powerpoint presentation.

Competitive Intelligence

"Competitive intelligence: an introduction" By Vernon Prior, FreePint (Jan 5, 2006) - overview of conducting competitive intelligence by author and presenter, Vernon Prior.

Business Research in Chaotic World

The New Life Cycle of Business Information By Marydee Ojala, Online (Jan 2006) - The life cycle of business information used to be linear, understandable, and traceable. Now, as Ojala, points out, it's a jumble -- "It can come from anywhere—a blog entry, a professional discussion list, a company message board, a rumor mill—rather than the traditional press release. Even unlikely sources can be authoritative ..."

Article shows how to manage in this new world - picking up press releases from news aggregators, getting RSS feeds from corporate blogs, and perhaps mining podcasts for the unintended divulgence.

LLRX Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide, LLRX (Nov 2005)

"Donna Cavallini and Sabrina I. Pacifici's revised and updated guide includes core, reliable free and fee-based resources in areas that include: search engines; business info sites and databases; TV and radio news transcripts; legislative monitoring and tracking; identification of company legal representation; benchmarking; and e-news sources."

Future for Find.com

Scientigo and Find SVP Partner for Enhanced Find.com EContent (Nov 29)

"The new Find.com service will leverage Scientigo's Tigo intelligent search technology to exploit niches in the search arena, starting with personalized local, mobile, and product search. This acquisition is the latest in a series of purchases, partnerships, alliances, and technology licenses between Scientigo and providers in specific vertical industries, including intelligent search, intelligent document recognition, and intelligent enterprise content management. "

Find.com welcome page says there will be a new product in 2006. Meantime use the old one at http://www.find.com/home/home.aspx

Biz Wiki for Learning Business Research

Ohio University Libraries are using the wiki format to assemble a collection of business information at Biz Wiki. It will contain articles about "business reference books, databases, websites, and other research guides" that are mainly available through the Ohio University community. However, non-Ohio people will still benefit from the articles about the resources - why and how to use them. Browse A to Z to get the fastest view of articles available.

Mentioned in ResourceShelf Professional Reading Shelf (Nov 23)

Alacra for business information

Alacra Launches the Alacra Wiki EContent (Sep 20)

"Alacra, Inc., a provider of online business information solutions, has announced the launch of the Alacra Wiki, a free collaborative Web site designed to help people find sources of business information. The Alacra Wiki provides descriptions and links to in-depth business and financial databases ranging from archival news services to industry-specific directories. Alacra designed its Wiki with the objective of enabling users to educate themselves about the companies and people that drive the business information industry."

Enhancements at Hoover's

Hoover's Rolls Out Significant Enhancements To Family Tree And Adds Deeper International Company Coverage Press release (Sept 8)

"Hoover's, Inc., a D&B company that gives its customers a competitive edge with insightful information about industries, companies and key decision makers, today announced significant enhancements to its Family Tree Viewer and additional international company coverage. The enhancements, available to subscribers immediately at www.hoovers.com, provide greater insight than ever before into companies and their corporate structures."

Reputation Monitoring

LeisNexis and Biz360 Partner on Reputation Monitoring Solution Newsbreaks (Sep 5) -- " LexisNexis (http://www.lexisnexis.com) announced the availability of LexisNexis MarketImpact, a reputation and brand monitoring solution. It is powered by Biz360 (http://www.biz360.com), a provider of market intelligence solutions that also provides the Web content. "

Alacra for business content

Alacra Opens E-Commerce Site for Business Professionals by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Aug 22)

New (in beta) - " Alacra Store (http://www.alacrastore.com), an e-commerce Web site that taps into 30 of Alacra’s premium content databases to provide pay-per-view access to a wide range of content from top business publishers, including CreditSights, Datamonitor, D&B, EIU, Freedonia, Leadership Directories, Snapdata International, and Thomson Financial. Available content includes company profiles and financials, credit research, economic data, market and investment research, and news."

Reports on how this service is being received by searchers and information professionals.

Factiva Reputation Monitor

Factiva Still Seeking the Bubble “Reputation” by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Aug 15)

"The new service covers more than 11,000 active Web sites, 4 million blogs and message boards, and the full array of Factiva’s 9,000-plus full-text sources, including online media, radio, and television transcripts. The blog and open Web content come from an agreement with Intelliseek, Inc., a Cincinnati-based concern. Content passes through a reputation analysis tool, along with text mining and visualization developed at the newly formed Factiva Reputation Lab. One expert who has tracked the field for years commented that Factiva’s effort this time has a strong chance to succeed."

It doesn't come cheap - " Reputation Intelligence start at $225,000 and run to approximately $300,000."

Trends in business information

"Trends in business information, provision and use"By Pam Foster, Freepint (August 11) - reports on trends in business information that have been drawn from the VIP publications. On the one hand, information companies are giving away some content, and on the other, search engines (Yahoo specifically) are providing ways to search for premium content. There has been lots of attention to Asia. Meantime the European online market is slowing down. Lots in this article.

Hoover's Free Site

Hoover’s Enhances Site, EContent (July 8)

"Featuring new task-oriented functional pathways to its business insight and tools, Hoover's free site delivers a streamlined customer experience through navigation, allowing faster access to its coverage of 13 million companies, more than 14 million decision makers and 600 industries." ... "Additionally, the enhancements now give Hoover's non-subscribers access to: complete, subscriber-only content for a selection of top public and private companies worldwide each quarter; tabular format search results including company name, company type, location, and sales; and a selection of Hoover's most-used subscriber tools, including Download to Excel, Build A Report, Build Company List and Build Executive List."

Competitor's Website

"Analysing corporate websites for competitive intelligence" By Arthur Weiss, Freepint, (May 5) - feature article on how to get the most out of your examination of a competitor's website.

"You need to look at it in its entirety, searching for things that are below the surface, while focusing on your own strategic and organizational needs."

Corporate Governance

News from Shirl Kennedy at Resourceshelf about corporate governance resources. "Resource of the Week is a new feature offered by Yahoo! Finance: corporate governance ratings from Institutional Shareholder Services, Inc. The ratings -- available for more than 7,500 publicly traded companies around the world (including 5,500 U.S. companies) -- are now part of the <b>company profiles on Yahoo! Finance. "

Gale's Goliath

Thomson Gale Quietly Rolls Out New Business Service - by Paula J. Hane. Newsbreaks (April 5) -- Paula Hane found Goliath, a new service from Thomson, by following a lead from FindArticles which now points to several premium content services.

Goliath, (http://goliath.ecnext.com/), from Thomson Gale, has business and industry news, management articles, corporate information on over 450,000 public and private companies, and contact information. Access is by subscription but there is also pay-per-view.

Article reveals some of the intricate web of relationships in the business of premium content.

Business Research

Book review: The Skeptical Business Searcher by Robert Berkman. Reviewed by Penny Leidtke in Freepint.

""The Skeptical Business Searcher" is an easy read with plenty of
examples, anecdotes and even a few case studies. "

More information about the book at http://books.infotoday.com/skepticalbiz/

Accoona for Web and News

Accoona Adds News Search Functionality to its Artificial Intelligence Search Engine PR Newswire (Feb 28) Accoona applies its SuperTargeting (TM) to news stories. Article does not mention how many sources but does say that Accoona has a 30-day archive.

Of interest: "Accoona's breakthrough AI algorithm greatly improves the quantity and quality of Accoona's News results by seeking out the context of keywords rather than the keywords alone. The SuperTarget(TM) feature gives users greater control and flexibility over their search results. By allowing seekers to emphasize the most important search terms, SuperTargeting(TM) yields the most relevant news results of any search engine."

From the Accoona web site -- "SuperTargetTM is the term used by Accoona to describe the search features that enable searchers to change the ranking of the results in the same query in order to bring more focused results to the top."

For example, on a search for pipeda records management, Accoona offers each of those words as SuperTargets - pick one and narrow results instantly. The first search looks like an OR although Accoona explains that " Accoona Artificial Intelligence Technology understands the meaning of words to get you more results." Using SuperTarget terms, however, will force the presence of those terms. Accoona has some powerful syntax too for constructing queries. There is no information on the size of the News collection or the Web index, but it's not tiny. On a search for "current awareness services", Accoona had 3,028 and Google, 29,100 hits.

Northern Light Back in Town

Northern Light, the search engine professional searchers used to love, may be back in business for business research. It's not free, but the $50 all-you-can eat monthly fee will be attractive to some.

Tara Calishain reviewed it in Is It the Return of Northern Light? Northern Light's information page is at http://www.northernlight.com/library.html. Impressive list of industries. Picks up full-text from "1500 trade journals, business publications, and newspapers with all the charts, tables, figures, and pictures from the original articles" and current news from 70 newswires. Also has a "Business Web of 20 million pages from 16,000 editorially-selected websites of public companies, private companies, trade journal and trade associations, venture funded companies, venture capital companies, corporate law firms, MBA programs, and the agencies of the Federal Government that regulate business". In addition to content, there are many good features - alerts, custom folders.

30 day trial available.

Market Research Tutorial

Knowthis.com has a good online tutorial on Finding Information for Market Research (Part 1) Part 1 is an overview of the inexpensive sources - associations, company web sites, government, third party and universities. Part two will get into the for-fee resources (available in March.)

Listening to consumers

"Understanding Consumers through Online Competitive Intelligence" By Patrice Curtis, Freepint (Feb 10, 2005) Main message - CI researchers - pay attention to consumers.

"CI researchers can gain so much more from sustained attention to
consumer activity. In fact, beyond simple defensive postures, CI
professionals can proactively assist decision-makers in driving
company growth by identifying trends that might drive future product
innovation."

ENTERWeb for Business Sites

ENTERWeb lists and reviews resources on the Internet related to business (765 sites as of today). It describes itself as "an annotated meta-index and information clearinghouse on enterprise development, business, finance, international trade and the economy in this new age of cyberspace and globalization". The Main Menu provides a topical breakdown.

Enterweb has added a section on Competitive intelligence and strategic intelligence. First entry is a Guide on Competitive Intelligence produced by Industry Canada.

ThomasNet.com

ThomasRegister.com and ThomasRegional.com are Now ThomasNet.com; Industrial Search Site Meets Needs of Buyers and Sellers BusinessWire via CBS Marketwatch (Feb 7)

"Thomas Industrial Network, Inc., a leading online provider of Internet sourcing and marketing solutions for industrial buyers and sellers, today announced the official integration of Thomas Register of American Manufacturers (ThomasRegister.com) into its new Website, www.ThomasNet.com(TM)."

Canadian Business Research

Canadian Companies Research Guide from Winspear Business Reference Library at University of Alberta. One page listing of sources of information about Canadian companies through articles, company directories, rankings, annual reports, ownership and stock data. Sources include commercial vendors and databases, print, and Web.

Databases require logging into the University of Alberta. However, you may find some of these - such as CBCA and Canadian Newstand - at the website of your local public library.

Winspear has other guides about U.S. Companies, International, Tracking Corporate History, Business People, and Canadian Stocks.

Mentioned in TVC Alert (Jan 26)

My Hoover's for Customizing Business Research

Hoover's Launches My Hoover's Suite of Customization Tools and Features EContent Magazine (Jan 18) - Hoover's Online, the research centre for company and industry information, is adding many new customization tools for its subscribers through the new My Hoover's.

FexIT for Business

FexIT.com Launches New Generation of Intelligent Web-Searching for Business> PR Newswire via CBS Marketwatch [subscription] (Jan 6) From Iceland comes FexIt -- "a new website that combines the comprehensiveness of a business directory with the power of a Web-search." There are five components: