Tara Calishain is the co-author of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research, 2nd Edition, and author or co-author of four other books. She is the owner of CopperSky Writing & Research.
In This Issue:
Hardware… Software… Peopleware?
Lotsa Lotsa Lotsa Company Profiles
Business Books Without the Back Strain
Who Knew There Were So Many Rules?
Get Your Market Research by the Slice
URL Hacking In Google
LLRXBuzz Archives: April 3, 2000 – Present
LLRXBu zz Research Tip Archives
The Latest on Legal Research
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Hardware… Software… Peopleware?
QCircuit has launched their online inventory of human experience at http://www.qcircuit.com/ . According to their press release, ten thousand people have signed up as QSources, people who are available to offer their expertise and know-how to corporations, organizations, and individuals.
There are 28 categories such as social work, sports and recreation, food and nutrition, science and technology, careers and professional development, and the arts. After choosing a category, you’re given a list of experts within that category. You can do another keyword search within the category or browse the listings. Once you see a listing you like, you can click the listing to browse what a mini bio of the QSource, their presentation preferences, target audiences, and cost.
In order to contact the QSource, however, you’ll have to register with the site. For more details, check out the QCircuit press release at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/000807/ny_qcircui.html
Lotsa Lotsa Lotsa Company Profiles
Dow Jones and Work.com have teamed up to offer over 11 million company profiles in the US. The data is available at http://dowjones.companyprofiles.work.com/ .There are a variety of ways you can search, including company name, executive name, address, industry type, city, state, or ticker.
I wouldn’t recommend this directory for finding public company information — Hoovers or some other public company information repository is better for that. However, there’s plenty of private company information here. Information includes company name, address, D-U-N-S number, stock ticker (if any) key personnel, services, years in business, etc.
Most of the time the company listings are in alphabetical order (if they don’t appear to be in order look for the “legal name” under the name listing) but some categories do have “premiere” listings at the top
Business Books Without the Back Strain
Looking for business knowledge but don’t have zillions of dollars to spend on hardcover wisdom? MeansBusiness (http://www.meansbusiness.com) contains thousands of extracts from hundreds of business books.
From the front page you can search the database by keyword, browse the over 600 book summaries in their database, or search by broad “concept” (leadership & change, sales & marketing, etc.) When concept searching you can narrow concepts, getting a list of available excerpts that deal with one topic. Most of the excerpts I saw cost $2.00.
Unfortunately, while the search engine is very good at providing summaries and book information about excerpts, I think page or word count would also be very helpful. Worth a look.
Who Knew There Were So Many Rules?
Everyrule — http://www.everyrule.com/indextop.htm — did. This site has rules in nine different categories, from casino games to sports to game shows. Need the rules to the Gong Show? You can link to them from here. How about curling? You can link to them here. Not all the rules are from sources you could call “canon” — for example, most of the TV game show rules seem to come from the same GeoCities Web site. But on the other hand, there are some more “official” sites — the curling rules from the USOC — and the site has a weekly newsroom that tries to keep up with rule changes from all over the place. A novel collection and worth a look.
Get Your Market Research by the Slice
Have you ever seen one of those really expensive market research reports that contained some information you wanted – – just a little, maybe a statistic or a chart — yet you couldn’t justify the $2500 expense of the report just for that information? MarketResearch ( http://www.MarketResearch.com ) wants to come the rescue by offering research by the “slice.”
From their front page you can do a keyword search of more than 6,000 publications, or you can browse by subject. As you browse, you’ll notice that the listings have a book icon or an e icon beside them. The listings with book icons are available in print only (and the ones I saw did not have slices available; you had to buy the whole report.) The listings with e icons are available for instant delivery. (Reports without icons are not available from MarketResearch, but they do provide information on where those reports may be bought.)
If you want to easily find an e-icon’d report, do a keyword search for “home fragrance.” When you click on a listing, you’ll find a variety of information, including publication date, size, document type, etc. You will see nothing about slices! Don’t despair; click on the “Table of Contents” icon. You’ll see the main sections of the report with a cost for each. If there are any blue triangle icons next to the sections, you can click on that and get a subsection listing with costs for those parts of the report that can be purchased separately. So of a single report that costs over $2000, you could pull out one figure and pay $30 for it. (Prices vary based on the size of the section you purchase.) After you’ve filled up your “shopping cart” you can pay online and take instant delivery of the sections you’ve paid for. A nice alternative when you need the facts, but not the entire report.
URL Hacking In Google
Several readers have written in about the new Google interface, annoyed because they have to set the number of results returned in the preferences screen. Some users don’t like having to activate cookies, some users use several different computers, and some users just find the change annoying. You have a few options:
1) Use the German interface, which still has the pulldown menu for Search results: http://www.google.com/search?lr=de
2) Use the advanced form, which gives you control over the number of results returned per page: http://www.google.com/advanced_search.html
3) Hack the URL. Add this to the end of the URL that shows up after you run a query: &num=x. The x can be any number from 1 to 100. For example, say you run the query “pin money” from the main page. The resulting URL looks like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22pin+money%22&hl=en&safe=off
Say you want that page to return exactly 38 results. You add &num=38 to the end of the URL, so it looks like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22pin+money%22&hl=en&safe=off&num38 (Just add that into the URL box. No need to open a new page.) Voila, you’ll get exactly 38 results. There are a couple other things you can hack in there too. &hl=en is the search interface language (change it to “&hl=de” and see what happens.) &safe=off means the filter is off. Changing it to &safe=on turns it on.