No-Cost Competitive Intelligence on the Web – A checklist

1. After checking a competitor’s web site, type in the competitor’s names using other search engines such as Yahoo, AltalVista, HotBot, or Infoseek. You may be able to find details about competitors, industry trends and customer opinions from these searches.
2. Hoover’s Online (www.hoovers.com) compiles historical financial data for more than 10,000 public companies, with detailed profiles on 2,500. If you go to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission home page (www.sec.gov) you can get official filings from public companies. Stats on Fortune 500 companies are on the www.pathfinder.com page via the Fortune button.
3. To get news about small private competitors go to Ecola’s 24 hour Newsstand www.ecola.com/news. Here you’ll find links to more than 2,000 Web sites for newspapers, business journals, magazines and computer publications. But clicking on Newspapers and typing in a rival company’s home city, a list of local papers appears.
4. To find out what’s been said about a company in the discussion groups on Usenet try Deja News Research Service www.dejanews.com which is the largest collection of indexed archived Usenet news. And for what has been mentioned in any electronic mail discussion group try Liszt www.liszt.com.
5. Other Business Resources – John Makulowich’s Awesome Lists (www.clark.net/pub/journalism/awesome.html) has links to more than 140 sites with good collections of business resources. StartingPoint www.stpt.com/busine.html features an extensive list of commercial directories and resources. The Competitive Intelligence Guide www.fuld.com provides good tips and an index of company resources in an "Internet Intelligence Index."