An excellent source of business information is your local phone directory. It often lists your local competitors, suppliers and customers. A few additional points to remember about WWW resources are that the data you need is the needle in a constantly growing haystack of new web pages. Note that U.S. material may not be applicable in Canada. The strong points about WWW business resources are that they are getting better and great resources can be found.
Governments provide many excellent web resources for business.
Each search engine operates differently from the others. Always use more than one search engine but two or three should be sufficient. Directories use an inverted cone approach to organizing information with the searcher drilling down through the information to the final few documents that are closest to the desired topic. Like search engines, directories are not all the same. It is generally easier to find relevant information using a directory rather than a search engine, but because they do not have the great scope of a search engine, a directory may not have the information you are seeking.