This month's column explores some more specific Internet search strategies, including searching for company information, tracking personal experiences, determining word usage, and broadening searches. Various print and online sources supply corporate addresses, merger and acquisition news, financial data, corporate ownership, and market share. The commercial online services have rich resources for all those categories and more. While finding information on small, private companies is not as easy, even small company information is available from some commercial online databases. The frequent general interest in company information has propelled various content providers to make some information available on the Net for free, at least for large or publicly traded companies.
Company profiles from Hoovers and daily stock prices are available from numerous sources.
Most companies have their own Web sites that provide substantial information, but from a particular point of view. For companies that may not be easily found elsewhere, HotBot and AltaVista offer two interesting and very different approaches. HotBot does not yet offer any database of company information to search, but in its regular Web index, it is currently the only search engine to offer a limit by page depth. Available only in the advanced search, now labeled as More Options, scroll down to the page depth limit. This should help identify the main page for a company, at least as long as it is indexed by HotBot and has its own domain name.