Since 1995, when it graced the cover of many major news and business magazines as the brave new technology on the block, the World Wide Web has swiftly formed the bedrock of delivery for business information. At Fuld & Company, a Cambridge-based competitive intelligence (CI) consulting firm, today's Internet and web serve as essential tools that boost both the variety and amount of information we are able to uncover for our client-based research projects.

As we all have experienced, the World Wide Web has changed everything in the past few years, offering desktop access to a diverse universe of free and low-cost information. While conventional fee-based online services migrate to the World Wide Web, they usually maintain their value for breadth of coverage, journalistic objectivity and credibility. However, as a daily CI researcher, I am intrigued with those creative ways to mine the Internet for nuggets of gold--and those occasional diamonds as well.

This article centers on recent web arrivals and several search techniques that provide unique or highly valuable CI information. It will not cover traditional online services that have migrated to the web. Nor will it cover the many well-known and useful sites commonly used for CI and business research, including SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) filings, Hoover's Online, general news sites, etc. I included these resources in a 1997 ONLINE magazine article, which provided an introduction and broader overview of the subject.

At Fuld & Company, our information professionals kick off our client research projects with searches of the Internet and commercial online services to locate facts and subject experts. In the second phase, our research analysts contact the subject experts for more details, particularly information that never finds its way into print. Our net-surfing yields valuable clues such as contract details, equipment specifications, new facilities, alliances, marketing strategies, research activities, expansion plans, plant capacity, corporate structures, client lists, and technological implementation. We peruse patent and trademark sites, Usenet discussion groups, job postings, resumes, government sites, company home pages, local press, ezines, trade publications, and much more. In addition, many employees receive daily targeted information alerts from news services and industry sources.

One favorite illustration of a gift from the Net revolved around a client-based research study of manufacturing and technological implementation in a beverage industry. I uncovered several vendors to the rival manufacturer by using a search engine to combine the rival's name along with the term client. One such vendor I located had a rich site for competitive intelligence mining. They posted the rival's manufacturing facility as a "success story" with close-up photos of the production lines. Their write-up also offered a vivid picture, detailing the quantity of beverage produced at the site, which lines they produced, who manufactured the cardboard packages, and what was the leading type of packaging.

Key Links

This example displays a crucial bequest of the web: its ability to directly display business relationships. Before the World Wide Web, when information professionals typically retrieved data from commercial online services, the information distribution was tightly controlled.

Although databases included resources ranging from newspapers to analysts' reports, the lion's share of that information tracked back to company-derived information such as press releases, speeches, and annual reports.

Today, anarchy reigns. While your competitor may not want to reveal the vendors providing its data mining applications, the supplying vendor may well be spreading the word. Distributors for your rival display price lists. Joint venture partners post contract details. And former employees disclose research specifics via publicly posted resumes. The hyperlinks as well reflect underlying business relationships, ultimately leading to more particulars posted by third parties. It is wonderfully surprising the amount of information available about a company at locations other than at its home page.

Taking the Broad View

As starting points, I often rely on several general business or overview sites that compile "approved" links in one place. CEO Express (http://www.ceoexpress.com) is a gem, serving as a one-stop guide to a myriad of business resources on the Internet. It logically organizes most major classes of resources including news, business and technology magazines, government sites, international business resources, and company research sites on a single page. And for international research, one of the first sites I click on is the versatile Corporate Information (http://www.corporateinformation.com), which links to a wide variety of resources arranged by country and region. This site provides easy access to stock exchanges, corporate directories, company profiles, government sources of information, and other (mostly free) useful information. And if you are ever stumped for the definition of a company incorporation designation, turn here as well.

Start Your (Search) Engines

It pays to explore the unusual and serendipitous discoveries found through traditional search engines. We typically search for the targeted company along with terms such as contract, client, customer, project, alliance, ally, partner, joint venture, or distributor. Next, we thoroughly explore these newly discovered web sites, looking for greater details concerning products and services; quantities purchased, contract duration, product specifications, installation locations, etc. Remember that these searches don't indicate the direction of the affiliation; a single search can uncover a rival's customers, or the companies for whom a rival is a customer. We also seek conference speakers who can serve as approachable subject experts. Furthermore, by searching for a company name along with the terms conference and speaker, we have successfully identified research details through PowerPoint presentations posted at conference sites. Make sure you understand the functions and operation of your chosen search engines, (also see the search engine sidebar) especially automatic truncation for plurals and the default operator (and or or).

Another fascinating search involves what I call a "reverse link look-up", a hunt for hyperlinks leading in to a company's home page. These links are signs of both official and unofficial relationships. Using this search for a client's research project, I was able to identify government discount programs in which a competitor's minor subsidiary participated. The competitor's site itself made no mention of the discount programs. One of our research analysts then contacted government employees for more information about the companies and their offerings. Two search engines allow this type of search. At HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com), change the drop-down box from "all the words" to "links to this URL". Then type in the entire web address: http://www.companyaddress.com. At AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com), type in: link:http://www.companyaddress.com.

A specialty search engine I particularly enjoy is the power search at Deja.com (http://www.deja.com/home_ps.shtml), which continues to deliver unique data by indexing and searching Usenet electronic discussion groups. Formerly known as Deja News, this service facilitates searches for job postings, job seekers, technical discussions, and industry-specific newsgroups of interest. For one recent client, we sought information about a competitor in the energy sector. A Deja.com search on the company's unusual name disclosed information about information technologies in use and exhaustive historical details about plant operations posted by activist organizations. I have been particularly lucky when looking for IT (information technology) infrastructure. When battling to get applications/products working properly, IT professionals often request assistance in these discussion groups. In order to receive help, they must specify applications or hardware in use!

Think Competitively,
Look Locally
News is now so ubiquitous on the web, it's difficult to avoid. However, I do want to highlight the news source essential to CI research and uniquely interested in your competitor: the hometown press. Small stories may fall below the radar of national periodicals, but they are food for the daily local press. Hometown companies contribute to the local economy, employ local readers, and may also pay for advertising. Therefore, the hometown newspaper serves as a treasure trove of news items large and small about native companies equally large and small.

The web can offer easy and low/no-cost access to this essential information. American City Business Journals (http://www.amcity.com/) is a prize indeed, with one searchable interface and free archives for forty-one business newspapers across the country. This resource recently provided a helpful hint at company growth through a news tidbit about a company seeking new office space. Two other valuable sites link to far more newspapers around the world, but content, price, language, and ease-of-use vary from site to site, because each paper controls its own web content. American Journalism Review's Newslink (http://ajr.newslink.org/news.html) and Editor and Publisher Interactive (http://emedia1.mediainfo.com/emedia/) connect to thousands of periodicals (along with radio and television stations), which you can view sorted by location or periodical type.

It's More Than a Job Posting
The myriad of employment- and career-based Internet sites can be rich resources for competitor information. Job postings can reveal details about a competitor's technological use, strategy, research focus, and even expansion plans. In 1997, we were seeking the web-based IT infrastructure being developed for a financial services firm. A search at Monsterboard (http://www.monsterboard. com) showed nearly one-hundred relevant job postings, displaying the hardware and software for easy viewing. Today, numerous Internet sites post jobs, including competitors' home pages, association web sites, and career and headhunting web sites. Yahoo! employment collection (http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Employment/Jobs/) offers links to many of the commercial career and job web sites. Also, a quick search via Deja.com's power page (http://www.deja. com/home_ps.shtml) may uncover jobs posted to technology- or industry-specific Usenet groups. Search the company name plus the terms job or position. You can also use CareerPath (http://new.careerpath.com/) to locate job ads from nearly ninety U.S. (and one U.K.) newspapers for the current and past week.

In the reverse direction, resumes posted on the net by current and former employees can similarly reveal a company's research focus or technologies in use. Combine the company name plus the term résumé. Be aware that this search yields both résumés and job postings (those that request a resume be submitted to the named company).

Patently Clear

Patent and trademark knowledge offers valuable early warning for a competitor's future direction. Today, your competitors are patenting and naming the technologies, products and services they will be marketing in just a few years. Two familiar web sites offer free full text databases of U.S. patents dating back to 1974. The Intellectual Property Network from IBM (http://www.patents.ibm.com/) includes patents from the original USPTO. (United States Patent and Trademark Office) database (http://www.uspto.gov). Both offer fulltext patents and images of U.S. patents. The IBM site now also offers a single interface to search patents plus patent documents from Europe, Japan plus the World Intellectual Property Office. In addition, you can access a variety of international patent resources via the European Patent Office site (http://www.european-patent-office.org/espacenet/info/access.htm).

The most useful search is for a competitor's name in the assignee field, as an invention is typically assigned to the employer (i.e., your competitor). For a larger company with countless patents, you may want to include several key terms in the abstract or title field. This search aids with a rough assessment of a competitor's patent focus.

Similarly, researching a competitor's new trademarks at the USPTO (http://www.uspto.gov/web/menu/tm.html) can alert you to products or services in the pipeline. A trademark granted by the USPTO awards the applying company (or person) exclusive rights to a word, phrase, symbol or design for commercial use--in essence, identifying a brand. However, there are several caveats. Not all brands are trademarked. The web database can have a long time lag. And, as a federal database, this does not include other trademarks such as those awarded from a state or a foreign government. Do hire a professional patent searcher or public record retrieval service when legal, financial or intellectual property rights are at stake: The financial and legal risks are considerable.

Keeping Alert

While the wide range and prompt delivery of Net-based information is a gift, it also can produce information glut. Fortunately, a variety of alerting services and current awareness tools can help manage this information overload, identify unusual facts and automate routine searches as well. For help choosing a traditional news alerting service, see Editor Robert Berkman's two-part review in Information Advisor. The web has also produced a new crop of unusual services that will alert you when web pages change or a competitor takes a variety of actions (which are then reported on the web). To examine several of these services in detail, see Greg Notess' article in ONLINE magazine.

One of the most remarkable services is offered by Company Sleuth (http://www.companysleuth.com), which gathers free company information from numerous Internet sites. When new bytes of information about targeted companies hit the electronic highway, Company Sleuth notifies you via email (with hyperlinks back to the Company Sleuth site for more information). This free service alerts you when your rivals (currently limited to U.S. public companies) submit SEC filings, receive patent or trademark approvals, post jobs, register domain names, or release news stories. By collecting data from multiple sites, Company Sleuth can consolidate time-consuming routine web searching with one automatic, free alert.

Other services can monitor specific competitors' web pages and alert you to new SEC filings, news announcements, trade show exhibitions, job postings, executive speeches, and product launches. Moreover, relying on simple news publication alerting services may not retrieve job advertisements, posted speeches or an array of useful facts. Two such free services, Mind-It from NetMind (http://www.netmind.com) and javElink (http://www.javelink.com/cat2main.htm), will monitor pages you specify, including job sites, association sites, or government agencies regulating your industry.

More expansive alerting services will watch the web as a whole, regularly search on your specified terms and then notify you when new results appear in the web world. One such service, Informant from Dartmouth College (http://informant. dartmouth.edu) relies on AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, and Lycos to watch the web while you perform more significant activities. TracerLock (http://peacefire.org/tracerlock) uses the AltaVista search engine. And Northern Light (http://www.northernlight.com) now features an alerting service that will notify you of new or modified items on the web or in the Northern Light special collection. Web and recent wire service stories are free, while special collection documents incur the usual costs.

The Global
Electronic Village
In our growing global economy, companies frequently spar with overseas rivals, thus feeding the need for international information. Fortunately, the past two years has also seen an explosive growth in low-cost global information on the Net. An array of international web sites help provide vital clues for our client-based research projects, including country- and region-specific directories, news resources, non-U.S. search engines, stock exchanges, embassies, and translation services. When exploring foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies or visa versa, there can be real rewards in exploring offshore web sites. In many cases, overseas sites reveal different information from those on the U.S. shores.

Several of our research projects have benefited from the increasingly global Internet. For a high-tech client, we located a volume discount list for products offered in Europe by a competitor's distributor. And for a direct marketing client, a rival's overseas web site announced expansion plans in previously untapped geographic regions.

The Electronic Embassy (http://www. embassy.org) offers an excellent example of value derived from unexpected resources. This aggregate web site, formed by the foreign embassies of Washington, D.C., offers links to embassy and country web sites (when available). In turn, these sites often hyperlink directly to informative resources within the respective nation, including news sites, company directories, trade information, government resources, and economic data.

For international research, consider utilizing the many nation- and region-specific search engines and directories. Sometimes, these sites can locate web pages missed by our North American and English-centric search engines.

Simple Gifts

Don't overlook the basics. There's no place like a competitor's home page for finding valid and valued information on the Internet. Go beyond the news and SEC filings to look for executive biographies, speeches, job postings, organizational charts, planned conference exhibits/attendance, and product specifications. You may even luck out and find audio or video files of CEO speeches or presentations to Wall Street analysts at the investor relations' area.

omepages also demonstrate the web's fundamental value as a dual-purpose database and advertising medium. For the first time, researchers can locate both text and images from the desktop. While companies use the web to hype their products, image and stock, even that "hype" has worth. Basic to an understanding of your competition is an awareness of their self-projected image.

Also explore trade association sites, which can provide valuable industry and company information. Association web sites can include member lists, news stories, issue analysis, statistics and links to other industry sites.

Competitive
Intelligence Sites
To further explore the field of CI, visit the SCIP (The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals) site (http://www.scip.org). It features electronic discussion groups, an expert/speaker database, publications, events calendar, job postings, advice forums, and information about the organization.

Fuld & Company (http://www.fuld.com) also explores the CI process and offers a collection of helpful resources including an expert forum, links to external resources, and a guide to software applicable to CI.

Holes in the Net

While I clearly am enamored of the Internet and the access it provides to free and low-cost desktop information, the Internet is often NOT the most inclusive, accurate, or trustworthy resource. We always verify information we find on the net. Moreover, Internet sites and service arise, die, and morph at the speed of electrons, making it difficult to keep current.

At Fuld, we still use commercial online services (both Internet-based and dial-up) and surely will for a good time to come. Nevertheless, the Internet serves a vital role in our research. And as an information professional focused on competitive intelligence, I know my future will include gathering the bits and bytes on the byways of the information highway.