[Note: The accuracy and reliability of data and information published on the Web is subject to continuous verification. It is recommended that you use multiple sources, cross-check data and routinely perform due diligence reviews on sources and publications to which you cite and from which you source data. The Web is a dynamic entity – sites often change URLs, content focus, and ownership. Many sites go offline with little or no notification. This guide is updated bi-annually in an effort to document sources for researchers that have been verified at the time of publication. This latest version of the guide includes dozens of updated links, deletion of sites that are no longer live, as well as numerous new entries throughout. For 19 years LLRX has not changed URL and remains an independent, non-affiliated, one woman owned and edited publication – so keep me on your reading list!]

Selected Search Engines, Web Archives, Open Data Repositories – facilitate locating information, data and analytics via: Web, Blogs, News, Video and specialized alerts.

Web and Data Search – searching and locating relevant, reliable and actionable information will benefit from consistently using a range of search engines, sources, applications and strategies in your research process. A selection of sources from which you may consider with assurance, dependent upon your specific research requirements, are as follows:

beSpacific is a free, factual current awareness research blog launched in 2002 – focused on reliable, comprehensive coverage of topical global news about and resources from areas that include: law, government documents, finance, economics, healthcare, education, technology, cybersecurity, privacy, civil liberties, and issues related to libraries in all sectors. Deep links located via expert, thorough research provide readers with direct access to an extensive range of timely documents from the government, academe, NGOs/IGOs, advocacy groups, corporate and legal sectors. Sources include state, federal and foreign governments, open access databases, surveys, technical reports and education-based sources from legal, government, library, advocacy and academic communities, as well as from information innovators. The searchable database has over 35,000 postings, and is updated daily. http://www.bespacific.com. See also the associated beSpacific Twitter feed. Readers may also subscribe to free weekday updates providing the complete set of daily postings in one HTML email.

bing from Microsoft – has moved to a social media focus with the tagline and associated links – “Explore” – Search with friends. Search the web, news, images, videos, maps, and your own search history maps [U.S. and global – directions – driving walking, transit, traffic updates, commerce, gas prices, parking finder, taxi fares], travel info, history, weather and more e-commerce related content. The Bing Help directory provides user-friendly explanations for features and tools, including email alerts, updates and available search options. See also the Bing Advanced Search Options page here.

BananaSLUG – “BananaSlug is all about serendipity: finding the unexpected in the trillion+ web pages Google indexes. Google usually gives you pages most relevant to your search term, based on the pages’ popularity on the Web. You may never see some of the pages way down the list that are relevant or interesting, but off the beaten path. So we give you a little boost. We “seed” your search with another word, chosen at random, and this accidental encounter results in pages you may have overlooked.“

“CiteSeer is an evolving scientific literature digital library and search engine that has focused primarily on the literature in computer and information science. CiteSeer aims to improve the dissemination of scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge.” http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/index

From InfoSpace, a reliable metasearch engine is dogpile. “Dogpile returns selected results indicating which are sponsored and which are not, from Google and Yahoo. Search results eliminate duplicates. Users may focus queries by choosing separate features: Web, Images, Video, News, Local, White Pages. There is a drop-down menu on the Search bar that provides users with Advanced Search features.

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) Advanced Search – “BASE is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.” http://www.base-search.net/Search/Advanced

“The CyberCemetery an archive of government websites that have ceased operation (usually websites of defunct government agencies and commissions that have issued a final report). This collection features a variety of topics indicative of the broad nature of government information. In particular, this collection features websites that cover topics supporting the university’s curriculum and particular program strengths.” http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/

eFinancialBot.com – Your Global Financial Search Engine by Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A – https://cse.google.com/cse/home?cx=003866911845372686500:03jpjpnuloq

DuckDuckGo – “a search engine with: • Way more instant answers – DuckDuckGo enables you to search 100s of other sites directly (see the Help Library to help leverage the site’s commands and strategies) using the site’s various features, tools and applications). Just use the drop-down next to the search box. As you use it, your most frequented sites will automatically be displayed at the top. • Way less spam and clutter. • Lots and lots of goodies – search fields for conversions, calculations, facts, zero-click info sources • and Real privacy – DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information.” “In May 2014 a re-imagined and re-designed DuckDuckGo was released. This new version of DuckDuckGo focuses on smarter answers and a more refined look. The site has added enhanced features including: images and videos users may view without leaving the page; finding places inclusive of maps and directions and flight information; auto-suggest for ambiguous search terms; recipes, nutrition information and weather search; and natural language queries generate answers from the site’s open source community. In addition, this search engine permits users to narrow searches to the specific issues chosen, not those that are automatically generated by an algorithm yielding unrelated results. Yet another new feature is described on the site as follows – “DuckDuckGo enables you to search directly on 100s of other sites with our, “!bang” commands.!bangs are shortcuts that start with an exclamation point like, !wikipedia and !espn. Use them to quickly search other sites from the DuckDuckGo search box.”And the new site continues to protect search privacy with no history maintained on user activities.

Exalead – Search for results from specific locations and sources (web sites, video, images, or Wikipedia). Use the advanced search feature, located to the right of the the main search box which opens as a drop-down menu, to specify: Exact Phrases, Exact Words, Exclude terms, Proximity Search, Search by Date or Date Range, and to Search by Title, URL, Link or specific Site.

Facebook is the world’s largest online social network, with more than 1.5 billion monthly users as of December 2015. Users may review features, new developments for mobile, features, and company information, via the Facebook Newsroom. Users may review Facebook user statistics and demographics here. Via Wikipedia: “Facebook Graph Search is a semantic search engine that was introduced by Facebook in March 2013. It is designed to give answers to user natural language queries rather than a list of links. The Graph Search feature combines the big data acquired from its over one billion users and external data into a search engine providing user-specific search results. In a presentation headed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it was announced that the Graph Search algorithm finds information from within a user’s network of friends. Additional results will be provided by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. In July it was made available to all users using the U.S. English version of Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/. Facebook has received considerable press since a revelation in June 2014 that went viral and whose details have resulted in many users re-examining their use of this service – see beSpacific for more details – Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment – Study.

Gigablast – As of 2015, Gigablast is one of the remaining four search engines in the United States that maintains its own searchable index of over a billion pages. Users may search the web or a selected topical directory. Try the Advanced Search feature to specify words, phrases, specific URLs and pages. After results are delivered, users may “Search in Category”, view related topics, view cached versions of search results. An example of a search for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) produces results with no advertisements, and also provides immediate comparative results from google and bing. “Gigablast is now available as an open source search engine on github.com. Finally a robust, scalable search solution in C/C++ that has been in development and used commercially since 2000. Features. Limited support available for free. Event Search Engine – Event Guru datamines events from the web. It identifies events on a web page, or even plain text, using the same rules of deduction used by the human mind. It also has Facebook integration and lots of other cool things. Based on Gigablast search technology. The Transparent Search Engine – Gigablast is the first truly transparent search engine. It tells you exactly why the search results are ranked the way they are. There is nothing left to the imagination.” Gigablast is located at http://gigablast.com.

Google – From a formerly crowded field a decade ago, there are now just two remaining major search engine powerhouses – bing, [Yahoo – powered by Bing], and Google. Google maintained the spot as Most Popular Search Engine in 2015, with various polls tracking it with 65% of core search queries conducted. In 2011 the user interface and many features underwent a significant overhaul – including the addition of a new social media application (Google+). The left hand side of the homepage (if not signed in to Gmail and using Firefox browser) lists the following field options: Search, Images, Maps, Play, YouTube, News – and below this list there is another titled Any time that includes options for time, date ranges as well as Google Blog search. Google’s Chrome browser offers a horizontally unfolding, three tiered panel of search options from which to choose, including: Google+, Images, Maps, YouTube, News, Gmail, Document, Calendar, Books, Music, Reader, and more. And via this Search Features GuUse this link to view all the search options on one page, arranged by Web, Mobile, Media, Geo, Home & Office, Specialized Search and Innovation. Note: users may choose to sign into one of their respective Google accounts to conduct a search, or not. Google is available in iterations for phone, tablet or computer. Searches may be conducted by typing or by voice command. See also the Google Advanced Search feature.

Google Scholar – “From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and legal opinions and journals and patents” (use this Advanced Scholar search for legal journals and opinions). Sources include academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites (use this site for Scholar Preferences search). See also Advanced Scholar Search tips to narrow and focus your scholarly content research results, as well as trying the menu that appears in the upper right hand corner of the main search screen (if you are signed int to one of the Google apps – and you will locate options – allowing a choice of content such as finance, maps, photos, translate… Note: added on July 10, 2012 – Sort by date for legal search. On November 19, 2013 – Google launched Scholar library, “your personal collection of articles in Scholar. You can save articles right from the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar’s full-text search & ranking to quickly find just the one you want – at any time and from anywhere.” See also Scholar Updates: Making New Connections – and create a public Scholar profile; Finding significant citations for legal opinions.

Google News Search (use the drop-down menu that appears when you arrive at this site, and make use of advanced search features to obtain more focused, accurate results). Users may also choose to: search news from specific countries; and view the news results accompanied by images, annotations and social media links, or just view the headlines. Additional newspaper archives are available via Journalism.net

governmentattic.org “provides electronic copies of thousands of interesting Federal Government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. This site provides the full text of current and historical documents, reports on items in the news” and reports that are otherwise not in the public domain without the intervention of the FOIA process. governmentattic.org

Ixquick is another specialized “privacy” search engine. The company claims to permit users to conduct private searches – no tracking of your IP address, browser information and no storage of your search history to minimize intrusion by unsolicited e-commerce. Search the web, images, video. An advanced search feature is available and suggested. This site offers the user a proxy option – you are anonymous to the site you are visiting. The site(s) you visit will see Ixquick’s IP address, not the IP address from which your search originates. This option will slow your search experience but may be useful.

Justia – Reliable, timely, comprehensive directory of primary and secondary legal resources, searchable and browsable by practice areas, topics and subject specific sources, cases in the news, legal blogs and expert commentary – http://www.justia.com/. Justia provides Free Daily Newsletters of Opinion Summaries for the US Supreme Court, all US Federal Appellate Courts & the 50 US State Supreme Courts and Weekly Practice Area Opinion Summaries Newsletters. Use this Link to Subscribe.

Law.com Search – a legal search engine from ALM, owner of leading legal local and national legal publications. “Search brings legal professionals relevant results from across the Law.com network of sites and the legal web, including hundreds of hand-picked law firm websites and legal blogs.” Large portions of the site’s resource http://www.law.com/resources are only available to subscribers.

LinkedIn: “World’s Largest Professional Network” – 400 million members. http://www.linkedin.com/. The site is now 12 years old. Although portions of the site are available free, users are offered tiered pricing subscription options to access additional information about members, as well as about their connections, to share their respective information, to search for and join topical knowledge sharing groups, to seek and to provide performance recommendations, as well as to block others from connecting. The site has become a benchmark for researching colleagues, job candidates, as well as for identifying key information on organizations, companies, academe, NGOs, government agencies and market sectors. Users may post their blog and twitter feeds and open them for network comments, request and market specialized expertise and services, and email one another via a LinkedIn email address. This a go-to site for competitive intelligence about individuals, organizations, customers, clients, and also for learning, education and knowledge management.

“OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open access resources that was built by harvesting from open access collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Today, OAIster includes more than 30 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,500 contributors.” http://www.oclc.org/oaister.en.html

OneLook – Dictionary Search “21,589,880 words in 1061 dictionaries indexed” http://www.onelook.com/

Project Muse – “Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community.” Try the advanced search feature – http://muse.jhu.edu/search/advanced#firstLoad

Search Engine Colossus, International Directory of Search Engines – links to search engines from 316 countries and territories around the world – http://www.searchenginecolossus.com/

ReportLinker – “Search industry reports, statistics and slideshows.” Data is sourced from government agencies, NGOs, IGOs, industry associations. http://www.reportlinker.com/

Science Direct’s search engine covers both subscription and open sources journals – and can be filtered by subject. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journals

SGER: Mining the Deep Web for Economic Data – https://covalentdata.com/research-grant/NSF%3A0207603

TinEye “is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. It is free to use for non-commercial searching. TinEye regularly crawls the web for new images, and we also accept contributions of complete online image collections. To date, TinEye has indexed over 13.6 billion images from the web to help you find what you’re looking for. For more information, please see our FAQ, and for some actual TinEye search examples, see Plugins, widgets & searches.”

Free internet search engine for over 6 million trademarked names, logos and slogans filed since 1870 – Trademarkia – Search for a trademark by: name, filing date(s), category, goods & services, company name, status. Users may also conduct free European Trademark searches as well as International Trademark searches, by choosing specific countries.

“TRID is an integrated database that combines the records from TRB’s Transportation Research Information Services (TRIS) Database and the OECD’s Joint Transport Research Centre’s International Transport Research Documentation (ITRD) Database. TRID provides access to more than one million records of transportation research worldwide.” http://trid.trb.org/

“Twitter has 645 million users – [requires username and password] it is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information from around the world on a huge range of topics, people, events, products, statistics, data, photographs, commentary, politics (anything you can think of you can probably search for and find information about on Twitter] Twitter Search engine as well as an Advanced Search page. See also the Twitter guide book by Mashable.

USA.gov is the official U.S. portal to federal, state, local, tribal, and international government information and services.” Use Search.usa.gov, “a comprehensive, searchable index of about 50 million pages from federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal websites.” [Note: via Michelle Chronister, Content Manager, USA.gov – “The USA.gov search engine searches the entire government web space. It is not limited to sites that can be accessed through USA.gov. We use the Bing index and then crawl specifically selected sites on top of it to create a comprehensive, government wide search.”]

Wiley Online Search Library – Use the advanced search feature http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/advanced/search to locate journal articles using field specific metadata as well as specific dates. Note – access to content is tied to subscription agreements.

World Bank Open Data – “free and open access to data about development in countries around the globe.” http://data.worldbank.org/

WTO Statistics Database- Search international trade and tariff data and time series. http://stat.wto.org/Home/WSDBHome.aspx?Language=

Yahoo! Search – Focus your search by choosing one of the following features: web, images, video, local, shopping, apps, news, directory, blogs, finance. The site also provides a helpful Advanced Web Search feature.

Yippy states that is provides privacy for your web browsing. It also detects and blocks sites that are not appropriate for children. From the company’s Annual Report Yippy queries Yahoo Boss, Highbeam Research, and other research oriented sites combining the results with Yippy internal indexes, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. This approach helps raise the best results to the top and push search engine spam to the bottom. What really makes Yippy unique is what happens after a user searches. Instead of delivering only search results, Yippy search groups similar results together into “Clouds” or clusters. The Clouds help separate search results by topic so the searcher can zero in on exactly what they are searching for. This is especially useful for students of all ages.”

YouTube – YouTube has more than one billion unique visitors each month – it allows users to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.” Users may search or browse topical categories that include: News & Politics, Nonprofits & Activism, People & Blogs, Science & Technology, Travel & Events. Additional education specific resources are available directly via YouTube EDU, which provides access to content in: Primary & Secondary Education, University & College, and Lifelong Learning areas.

Customized Topical Search Engines Developed by Academe and Professionals

Searching think tank, NGO and IGO information is an increasingly important facet of an effective search strategy. There are many organizations that comprise the “think tank” space, so it is significant that a number of search engines have been developed to focus on locating and surfacing this content.

American Policy Directory from the University of Oregon libraries, provides access to dozen of topical search engines specific to think tanks focuses on a range of issues that includes: business, civil rights, constitutional rights, consumer protection, economic rights, public finance, and women’s issues. Users may search all topics the site covers or individual topics.

Find Policy – A multidisciplinary search engine with a global perspective – focuses on climate, economy, development, foreign policy, health, public policy, and “wonks”

Non-Governmental Organizations Search is a customized Google Search tool that was created by US and international info pros providing access to content specific to US and international NGOs.

Think Tank Search is the work of librarians at Harvard University. “Think Tank Search is a custom Google search of more than 600 think tank websites. For the purposes of this search, think tanks are defined as institutions affiliated with universities, governments, advocacy groups, foundations, non-governmental organizations, and businesses that generate public policy research, analysis, and activity. Inclusion is based upon the relevancy of subject area to HKS coursework and scholarship, the availability of the think tank’s research in full-text on the website, and the think tank’s reputation and influence upon policy making. The list represents a mixture of partisan and non-partisan think tanks.”

Open Source Research Archives and Portals

HathiTrust Digital Library – “Millions of books online. “The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) enables computational access for nonprofit and educational users to published works in the public domain and, in the future, on limited terms to works in-copyright from the HathiTrust. The HTRC is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. There are more than 80 partners in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide. HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives. The partners ensure the reliability and efficiency of the digital library by relying on community standards and best practices, developing policies and procedures to manage content and services at scale, and maintaining a modular, open infrastructure. along with the HathiTrust Digital Library, to help meet the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of digital text that researchers face by developing cutting-edge software tools and cyber-infrastructure to enable advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge.” At the time of this publication, this site indicated it had digitized 11,412,713 total volumes. http://www.hathitrust.org.

PLoS / Public Library of Science – “PLOS (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization with a mission of leading a transformation in scientific and medical research communication. Every article we publish is open-access – freely available online for anyone to use – which benefits everyone, from researchers, educators, and patient advocates to funders, policymakers, and the public. Sharing research encourages progress – from protecting the biodiversity of our planet to finding more effective treatments for diseases such as AIDS or cancer.”

Web Archive – “The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.” http://archive.org/

Wayback Machine: “Browse through over 456 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported.” https://archive.org/

Federated Search

The power and relevance of federated search is succinctly described as mining the deep web, and explained by the Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific & Technical Information: “To get to the deep web, you need discovery tools, such as Science.gov, (U.S. science information), and WorldWideScience.org (global science information). With these tools you can find the richest scientific content – the results of billions of dollars worth of government-sponsored scientific research results. In one query, you can search multiple databases at one time, sort through the information in ways that are useful to you, and rapidly return relevant results to your desktop.

See also Deep Web Research 2014, by Marcus P. Zillman – an extensive and diverse bibliography of applications, sources, services, and tools to facilitate mining the deep web.

EconPapers – “use the RePEc bibliographic and author data, providing access to the largest collection of online Economics working papers and journal articles. The majority of the full text files are freely available, but some (typically journal articles) require that you or your organization subscribe to the service providing the full text file. RePEc is a distributed data set residing in over 1100 archives operated by research organizations, academic departments and publishers.”

Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) is the finding tool for federal publications that includes descriptive records for historical and current publications and provides direct links to those that are available online. Users can search by authoring agency, title, subject, and general key word, or click on “Advanced Search” for more options. http://catalog.gpo.gov/F

EigenFactor – Ranking and Mapping Scientific Knowledge: “The Eigenfactor Project™ is a non-commercial academic research project sponsored by the Bergstrom Lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. We aim to use recent advances in network analysis and information theory to develop novel methods for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for mapping the structure of academic research. We are committed to broadly disseminating our research findings and technological developments, while respecting the confidentiality of the data sources we use. Several aspects of the Eigenfactor Project can be found at Eigenfactor.org http://www.eigenfactor.org/

Google Scholar Advanced Search – “search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.”

As a subset of Google Scholar, please note the following: “A Google Scholar Universal Gadget which enables users to search for the total number of citations of author(s). It provides a total citation count, total number of cited publications and Jorge E. Hirsch’s H-Index.”

Google Scholar Metrics include journal articles from websites that follow our inclusion guidelines, selected conference articles in Computer Science & Electrical Engineering and pre-prints from arXiv, SSRN, NBER, and RePEc. As in previous releases, publications with fewer than 100 articles in the covered period, or publications that received no citations are not included.”

ixquick is another private search engines. The company claims to permit users to conduct private searches – not tracking of your IP address, your browser information and no storage of your search history to minimize intrusion by unsolicited commercial and non commercial enterprises. Search the web, images, video. An advanced feature is available and suggested. This site offers the user the proxy option wherein you are anonymous to the site you are visiting. The site will see Ixquick’s IP address, not the IP address from which your search originates. This option will slow your search experience but may be useful

MetaLib, a service of the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications is a federated search engine that searches multiple U.S. Federal government databases, retrieving reports, articles, and citations while providing direct links to selected resources available online. To learn more, view additional brief or detailed search information. http://metalib.gpo.gov/V?RN=990715120

“Microsoft Academic Search – Microsoft Academic Search is a free service developed by Microsoft Research to help scholars, scientists, students, and practitioners quickly and easily find academic content, researchers, institutions, and activities. Microsoft Academic Search indexes not only millions of academic papers, it also surfaces key relationships between and among subjects, content, and authors in a manner that highlights the critical links that help define scientific research. Microsoft Academic Search makes it easy for you to direct your search experience in interesting and heretofore hidden directions with its suite of unique features and visualizations.” The advanced search feature allows users to target the following fields: Author | Conference | Journal | Organization | Year | DOI.

“Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a world wide collaborative of over 175,000 authors and more than 1.3 million users that is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research. Founded in 1994, it is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences. Each of SSRN’s networks encourages the early distribution of research results by reviewing and distributing submitted abstracts and full text papers from scholars around the world. SSRN encourages readers to communicate directly with other subscribers and authors concerning their own and other’s research. Through our email abstracting eJournals we currently reach over 400,000 people in approximately 140 different countries. SSRN’s email abstracting eJournals cover over 1,000 different subject areas. The SSRN eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 642,800 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 348,800 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat pdf format. The eLibrary also includes the research papers of a number of Fee Based Partner Publications. To browse SSRN’s eLibrary subject area networks, click here.”

USA.gov – U.S. Government’s official web portal for all government transactions, services, and information. http://www.usa.gov/

WorldWideScience.org “is a global science gateway—accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases and portals. Researchers can search text, audio, video and images in multiple languages.”

WorldCat.org – The world’s largest library catalog – with 1.6 billion searchable items available including books, DVDs, CDs and articles. http://www.worldcat.org/

Zillow – “Trusted source of free information on home prices, rental estimates, and other analytic tools for determining the value of nearly every available address in the US.” Zillow leverages big data analytics on home prices, rental estimates, county tax assessor data and other local government data on deeds, mortgages and real estate transactions, rental data, as well as American Community Survey and American Housing Survey results. On July 18, 2014 Zillow announced the acquisition of Trulia, a major competitor in the real estate marking sector.

Blog Search and Social Media

The dramatic ascendance of social media is in no small measure responsible for a corresponding fall in the demand for blog specific search engines. This phenomenon correlates with the collapse of competition and choice in the web search sector – there are now just two dominant services: Google and Bing. Free and open blogs continue to flourish, even though many pundits are prematurely declaring their demise in the wake of the dominant social/professional media quartet: Twitter, Facebook (“one of the largest websites in the world, with more than 1.5 billion monthly users”) and LinkedIn. Researchers should resist the temptation to abandon blogs by the clarion call of “faster, smaller, and social” [Jeremiah Owyang]. Locate and subscribe to specific blog feeds to benefit from continuously updated, value-added, actionable content. Read the postings of authors whose professional, accurate, current, well-documented, topical knowledge you determine will serve as an integral component of your specific CI or BI process. This strategy encompasses leveraging intelligence from all sectors, not a decision to tap into a stream of information from only one publisher. Information omnivores are the norm in the CI/BI sector with good reason – they recognize the importance of exploring extensive and varied research options, keeping in mind that good data often resides in deep web sources, from which analysis is derived and services delivered to users and customers.

IceRocket Blog Search – narrow search results to: Blogs, Twitter, Facebook http://www.icerocket.com/

Justia Blawg Search – searchable directory of legal blog postings, continually updated. Sort results by date or relevance. Browse blogs by category, country, law school. http://blawgsearch.justia.com/

Twitter (microblogging application – postings are limited to a maximum of 140 characters). Use the excellent, field specific –https://twitter.com/search-advanced”>Advanced Search. See also – How to Use Advanced Twitter Search. Twitter has also added news search filters so that users may search by people, photos, videos, news. The site also provides search operators https://twitter.com/search-home# for use in the advanced search modes https://twitter.com/search-advanced

News Search and Real Time News Video

Bloomberg News – “exclusive news, worldwide news, regions news, markets news, industries news, economy news, politics news, law news, environment news, science news, arts & culture. http://www.bloomberg.com/news

Google News – Search, browse and share news, updated continuously. Includes press releases from Business Wire, Canada NewsWire, PR Newswire, U.S. Newswire. Users may customize/personalize the news page view according to: country/locale; topics; frequency for delivery of updates, opt-in for email and or RSS alerts delivered to desktop or mobile devices. http://www.google.com/news

Google News archive advanced search – the drop-down navigation box appears when the user mouses’ over the search box, or clicks on the the down arrow in the search box. For Google News, users may choose to use fields to limit results specific to: words, phrases, date ranges, sources, locations. Sort results by: top stories, all news, images, blogs, any recent news [specifying: past hour, day, week, month, year], sort by relevant date [use the custom date range feature – results returned include “Pay-Per-View” content in abstract form with links to the source/publisher and commercial databases if available – some searches yield links to abstracts back to the 1900s]. Users may also choose to view local stories; specify city, state or zip code, search for articles by author, and by specific source. Users may also choose to hide duplicate results. https://news.google.com/news/advanced_news_search?as_drrb=a

Justia News and Featured Cases – sources include: ABA Journal, Law.com, Legal Times, Jurist, and legal blogs. http://news.justia.com/

NewsNow’s “services include NewsNow.co.uk, one of the UK’s most popular news portals…corporate services include online press cuttings, market intelligence, competitor tracking and website and intranet content. Provides real-time searching of 20,000 sources comprising international, national and regional papers, consumer, trade and technical titles, government press pages, press releases, blogs, webzines and newsletters in more than 15 languages from 84 countries.” http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/

Newspaperindex.com – daily index of evaluated newspapers and front pages that are freely available from every country. http://www.newspaperindex.com/

Reuters Business & Financial News – Search quotes, news, video, pictures. Editions available from US and around the world. http://www.reuters.com/finance.

Reuters – Breaking US & International news & markets, sectors & industries, analysis & opinion, with a focus on financial services, media and corporate markets. continuously updated and searchable news, images, video. Includes international editions – links at very top of home page. Company search available using name or stock symbol. http://www.reuters.com/

Yahoo News Search – Web | Images | Video | Local | News | Shopping http://news.search.yahoo.com/. See also Yahoo Advanced Web Search, http://search.yahoo.com/search/options?fr=srch_more, to focus search terms, date range, file format, country, language and result requirements.

Creative Commons Search – “this search helps you find content published by authors who want you to share or reuse it, under certain conditions.” http://search.creativecommons.org

Worldstream Mobile Video by WSJ Reporters Around the Globe — Powered by Tout

News Search Alerts

Google Alerts – updates from Web, news, blogs, real time, videos, discussions – frequency: as-it-happens, daily or weekly), via keyword searches created by the user – http://www.google.com/alerts

FindLaw newsletters – mobile friendly version available – daily opinion summaries, weekly case summaries, legal news topics, selected blog newsletters – http://newsletters.findlaw.com/

Law.com Legal News and Newswire – access to fee and free articles, news, updates – http://www.law.com/#

MarketWatch.com -the Wall Street Journal – Stock Market, Business and Financial News and Commentary, and Investor Research. Register to receive Alerts using the link located on the top right navigation bar – http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/alerts/myalertsummary.asp?link=MW_Nav_AL

Yahoo! Alerts – news updates from the Web and blogs, via keyword searches created by the user – http://alerts.yahoo.com/

Selected Business Info Websites, Databases and Blogs – Fee and Free

Fee Based Sites and Databases

Best Free Reference Web Sites Combined Index, 1999-2015 RUSA Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) – “This is an index of the web sites included in the 1999-2014 annual lists issued by the MARS Best Free Reference Web Sites Committee of the MARS: Emerging Technologies in Reference Section of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of ALA to recognize outstanding reference sites on the World Wide Web.”

Data-Planet Statistical Datasets: “Easy access to the largest repository of standardized and structured statistical data. The Data-Planet™ repository contains more than 90 billion data points from more than 70 source organizations. The over two billion time series in Data-Planet provide immediate access to data presented in charts, maps, graphs and table form, with multiple points of entry. With the ability to instantly chart, map, and compare two billion time series at the county, MSA, census-tract, state and country level, Data-Planet is revolutionizing statistical research.”

Dun & Bradstreet, D&B – global commercial database contains more than 125 million business records – http://www.dnb.com/

Financial Times – world business, finance and political news (fee and free) – http://www.ft.com/home/us

KnowX.com – search for businesses, people and assets – free to search, fee to view records. https://www.knowx.com/index.jsp [Owned by LexisNexis.

LexisNexis Accurint, subscription req’d – provides access to millions of data records on individuals and businesses – http://www.accurint.com

Standard & Poor’s, subscription req’d – “With over $4.5 trillion benchmarked to Standard & Poor’s family of indices, including the S&P 500, the S&P Global 1200, the S&P Europe 350, and S&P/Citigroup Global Equity Indices, Standard & Poor’s is the world’s largest index provider.” http://www.standardandpoors.com/home/en/us

ViewsWire – Business Intelligence on 205 countries from the Economist Intelligence Unit, http://viewswire.eiu.com/?rf=0

The World Bank eAtlas suite of user-friendly, interactive electronic atlases, allows users to map and graph dozens of indicators over time and across countries. It allows users to see how a country fares on several dimensions of well-being and empowerment by clicking on an indicator after a keyword search. When the indicator is selected, a world map appears, showing the latest data for more than 200 economies.” http://data.worldbank.org/products/data-visualization-tools/eatlas

Free Sites – some with registration and/or fee components

AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch – Data is available in the following topics: Company Name, 100 Highest Paid, Pay by State, Pay by Industry, Mutual Fund Votes, Data Sources – http://www.aflcio.org/Corporate-Watch/Paywatch-2015

Business Wire – free access for current 30 days – “Business Wire is the leading source for press releases, photos, multimedia and regulatory filings from companies and groups throughout the world [Edgar filing, XBLR].” http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/

CNN Money Company Research Lookup – background information, vital statistics and earnings estimate information. http://money.cnn.com/news/companies/

CORI Contracts Database – “The CORI K-Base library contains over 690,000 contracts. Most of the contracts in the collection are executed agreements made available in public disclosure filings or in filings with a regulatory agency. Currently, the collection is primarily drawn from filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) EDGAR Database. The required disclosure filings made by publicly traded companies frequently contain contracts that are of material interest to investors. CORI has downloaded, extracted, and categorized these contract filings to make them more directly available. In addition to the primary collection, special collections that were previously available only in hard copy are now available in the v1.1 CORI Digital Library Collection. These collections includes HMO-Physician agreements, sports stadium leases, container shipping contracts, and more, and is full-text searchable. First-time users must complete a free registration.” http://ronald.cori.missouri.edu/cori_search/

EDGAR Full-Text Search – “This page allows you to search the full text of EDGAR filings from the last four years. The full text of a filing includes all data in the filing as well as all attachments to the filing.” https://searchwww.sec.gov/EDGARFSClient/jsp/EDGAR_MainAccess.jsp

EIU.com – from the Economist intelligence unit – subscription or pay as you go options available, “analysis and forecasts on more than 203 countries and eight key industries.” http://viewswire.eu.com

Europages – has 1.500.000 European and international suppliers, manufacturers and distributors listed in its B2B directory. http://www.europages.co.uk/

“The European Patent Register – “The European Patent Register contains all the publicly available information on European patent applications as they pass through the grant procedure, including oppositions, patent attorney/EPO correspondence and more. This service also provides for public file inspection – click on the “all documents” tab – and legal status information for the national phase.” https://register.epo.org/regviewer

Fortune Business News – http://fortune.com/. See also the Fortune 500 lists from 1996 to 2015 annual ranking of America’s largest corporations.

Forbes Lists (companies, sectors, markets, people, products – the biggest, best, richest, etc.) – http://www.forbes.com/lists/

Global Business Register – “GBRDirect provides a single access point to official information on companies around Europe. The information is sourced directly from the official national business registers of each European country and is delivered in real-time to your desktop.” http://www.globalbusinessregister.co.uk

Google Finance – updated market summary, recent quotes, today’s news, sector summary, today’s movers – http://www.google.com/finance

MarketWatch.com – The Wall Street Journal – stock market quotes, business news, financial news – http://www.marketwatch.com/?siteid=&avatar=seen&dist=ctmw

MSN Money Central – stock company reports – http://money.msn.com/stocks/

Moodys.com – subscription req’d, credit ratings, research and risk analysis – https://www.moodys.com/

Reuters Financials – headlines, company information, analyst research, industry watch, stocks. Some data requires registration – http://www.reuters.com/sectors/financials

SEC Info – registration req’d – data from the SEC EDGAR database. Search by Name, Industry, Business, SIC Code, Area Code, Topic, CIK, Accession Number, File Number, Date, ZIP. http://www.secinfo.com/

Time Business & Money – news and views on the economy, markets and business– http://time.com/business/

solusource: “Find industrial product and company information from around the world in one place.” Search fields: Global Products; Suppliers By Category; Company Name; Keyword. solusource

ThomasNet: Choose suppliers from 67,000 categories and 30,000 suppliers semantic search technology can transform your search for parts, components, materials, and more.” http://www.thomasnet.com/

West Thomson Monitor Suite is a set of services that drive your firm’s strategic business decisions. Litigation, IP, and Deal Monitor provide unique analysis of the marketplace that will inform your business development process http://www.monitorsuite.com/signon/information.aspx – subscription req’d

Best-Performing Cities: “The Milken Institute Best-Performing Cities Index ranks U.S. metropolitan areas by how well they are creating and sustaining jobs and economic growth. The components include job, wage and salary, and technology growth. In most years, these give a good indication of the underlying structural performance of regional economics.” The latest full report can be downloaded here.”

United States Patent Office – Patent Full-Text Databases http://patft.uspto.gov/

Who Owns What in Media – Columbia Journalism Review – http://www.cjr.org/resources/

Yahoo Economic Calendar/Financial Calendars – http://biz.yahoo.com/c/e.html

Yahoo Financial News – Aggregates news by specific providers/fee and free, including: AP, Bankrate.com, bizjournals.com, BusinessWeek, Daily FX, Forbes, Fortune, FT.com, Investor’s Business Daily, Kiplinger.com, MarketWatch, Morningstar.com, Motley Fool, Reuters, SmartMoney.com, TheStreet.com, The Wall Street Journal. These links are located in a table on the far right hand side of the home page. http://us.biz.yahoo.com/top.html

Selected Historical Corporate Sector Data Sources

Via Harvard – see http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/collections/hcr/“>Historic Corporate Reports”. “Baker Library has one of the largest collections of corporate reports in the world. The Library is committed to maintaining and developing this collection of annual reports and related material in their original paper form. http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/collections/hcr/

Via Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Business Libraries, an excellent http://guides.library.jhu.edu/c.php?g=202476&p=1335782

Via the Library of Congress – DealBook, from the New York Times – Mergers & Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Hedge Funds, IPO Offerings, Venture Capital, Legal/Regulatory http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/dealbook/index.html/

WSJ MoneyBeat – from the Wall Street Journal (free): “MoneyBeat is an up-to-the-minute take on the deals and deal makers that shape the landscape of Wall Street, including mergers and acquisitions, capital-raising, private equity and bankruptcy. In short, wherever money changes hands. Deal Journal is updated throughout each trading day with exclusive commentary, analysis, data, news flashes and profiles.” http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/

Financial Times Tech Hub tech analysis and reviews (free) – http://blogs.ft.com/fttechhub/#axzz1iFxlNZJn/. See also this list of other free financial blogs via FT.com.

footnoted* – “Each day, the site takes a closer look at the things that companies try to bury in their routine SEC filings.” http://footnoted.com/ [As of 2013 this site requires a subscription but some content remains free.]

Real Time Economics – Economic insight and analysis from The Wall Street Journal (free). http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/

Seeking Alpha – “We handpick articles from the world’s top market blogs, money managers, financial experts and investment newsletters – publishing approximately 250 articles daily. Seeking Alpha gives a voice to over 7,000 contributors, providing access to the nation’s most savvy and inquisitive investors. Our site is the only free, online source for over 1,500 public companies’ quarterly earnings call transcripts, including the S&P 500.” http://seekingalpha.com/

Selected Online People Tracking Sources

Accurint (owned by LexisNexis), provides access to millions of data records on individuals and businesses – http://www.accurint.com

Ancestry.com – “genealogy, family trees and family history records online,” fee req’d – http://www.ancestry.com/

Avvo.com – Browse for legal and health advise from professionals registered with the site. Professional ratings for dentists, doctors and lawyers also available. http://www.avvo.com/

FamilySearch.org – “FamilySearch is the largest genealogy organization in the world. For over 100 years, FamilySearch has been actively gathering, preserving, and sharing genealogical records worldwide. Patrons may freely access our resources and service online at FamilySearch.org, or through over 4,500 family history centers in 70 countries, including the renowned Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.” Users may search and view some data free, but fees do apply for many records. http://familysearch.org

FindLaw Search for a Lawyer or for a Law Firm – http://lawyers.findlaw.com/lawyer/lawyer_dir/search/jsp/name_search.jsp

Forbes – search people, companies, money and investing, places, sports and lists. http://www.forbes.com/lists/

Google – Search web, images, news, video, maps, etc. http://www.google.com

Gumshoe Librarian 2006 – by Barbara Fullerton and Sabrina I. Pacifici – Resources, services, databases and finding aids and tools from around the world. //www.llrx.com/features/gumshoe06.htm

Infobel World – Telephone Directories – information for more than 216 countries, http://www.infobel.com/en/world/index.aspx

Justia Lawyer Directory – Find Attorneys, Law Firms, Legal Aid and Legal Services – http://lawyers.justia.com/

Martindale.com, search for credentials on over 1 million participating lawyers and law firms, http://www.martindale.com

Pipl People Search – “The most comprehensive people search on the web. We dive into the deep web to bring you results you won’t find in any other search engine then we use a powerful identity resolution engine to link those seemingly disparate results into a set of meaningful profiles so you can easily find the person you are looking for.” https://pipl.com/

Search Systems – over 55,000 free searchable public records databases, including international (fee and free access) – http://publicrecords.searchsystems.net/

Thomson Legal Record [subscription only] “is a unique research tool, combining an attorney’s litigation history on Westlaw with the attorney’s profile on FindLaw [U.S. and Canada]. It provides a simple, efficient, fully documented resource for legal and corporate professionals seeking experienced litigators and a verifiable basis for decision-making.” http://www.thomsonlegalrecord.com/info/

Yahoo! People Search – free phone number, reverse phone number and email search. http://people.yahoo.com/

Zaba Search – “Telephone Numbers and Addresses Revealed Free. No Registration Required. Three Times More Residential Listings than White Pages Phone Directory.” There is a fee component for background search data. http://www.zabasearch.com/

Television and Radio News Transcripts – including streaming audio/video [Fee and Free]

blinkx – “An index of over 6 million hours of searchable video and more than 800 media partnerships, including national broadcasters, commercial media giants, and private video libraries…” http://www.blinkx.com/

Bloomberg.com TV – Live TV, video and shows – 24-hour business and financial news. Free and Fee. http://www.bloomberg.com/tv/

CBSNews.com – breaking news headlines, links to investigative shows and news programs, as well as video and text. http://www.cbsnews.com/

Critical Mention – Critical Mention is a subscription service that “provides global media intelligence combining real-time broadcast, online and social media coverage with advanced analytics and tools that power clients’ social video strategies…instant delivery of news coverage to mobile, tablet and web devices. Critical Mention’s cloud-based software is used by marketing, advertising and public relations professionals inside corporations, PR and digital agencies, not-for-profit organizations and government.” Subscription only. http://www.criticalmention.com/media-monitoring/

Google Video – See YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/, owned by Google.

Yahoo! Video Search – “Yahoo! Video allows you to search millions of videos from across the Web.” http://video.search.yahoo.com/

ShadowTV – “TV, Internet, Social Media, Print or Radio. Wherever the news appears, you will find it quickly and easily on ShadowTV, your complete source for media monitoring.” Fee – http://www.shadowtv.com/

TVEyes – “TVEyes makes TV and radio broadcasts searchable by keyword, phrase or topic – just as you would use a search engine for text. TVEyes Media Monitoring Suite is a subscription-based product used by PR professionals, Fortune 500 companies, Political Campaigns, Government Agencies, and anyone who needs to know what is being broadcast on TV and radio in real-time.” Fee. http://www.tveyes.com

The Tyndall Report monitors the weekday nightly newscasts of the three American broadcast television networks. The Tyndall Blog monitors and comments on each night’s newscasts and links to the stories that the networks aired.” http://tyndallreport.com/ [Note – this site has been updated to January 2014 – the archive remains available, linked from the home page.]

Federal News Service – “Fast, accurate verbatim transcripts of every major political figure in Washington within hours of the event, delivered in real time via FastWire and posted to Washington Transcripts subscription website. Our transcriptionists are experienced, DC-based news junkies fluent in “Washington-speak” and the nuances of international politics. Archives cover 26 years worth of transcripts. Include a daily schedule of everything of note in Washington with our own Washington Daybook. Your Washington Transcripts subscription includes Congressional hearings, Middle East Transcripts, archives back to 1985 and our unique FastWire service.” Fee. http://www.fednews.com

Vanderbilt Television News Archive – “The mission of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive focuses on creating, preserving and providing access to the news broadcasts from the U.S. national television networks. We create recordings of news broadcasts from the U.S. national television networks, preserve the content for future generations, and provide the widest access possible within the copyright limitations. We have been recording these broadcasts since August 5, 1968. The core of our collection consists of regularly scheduled newscasts from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News. We also record other news content as it happens beyond these newscasts, including material from other networks.” http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/

YouTube – “Founded in February 2005, YouTube allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.” [owned by Google] http://www.youtube.com/

Legislative Monitoring and Tracking

CapitolHearings.org – http://www.capitolhearings.org/ via C-SPAN.

CQ Roll Call (subscription req’d) – Congressional news, insights, analysis, legislative tracking, members and votes, advocacy tools. Legislative tracking and monitoring service offers users the ability to create customized delivery of services, including time sensitive alerts and updates, via website, email updates, and RSS. Bill tracking and monitoring, daily links to HotDocs, full-text CRS reports.

OpenCongress Wiki – “is an editable guide to Congress for the people, by the people.” http://www.opencongress.org/wiki/Wiki_Home

C-SPAN – C-SPAN is a private, non-profit public service of the cable television industry that covers the political process. C-SPAN receives no funding from any government. C-SPAN’s operating revenues come from license fees paid by cable systems and satellite companies that offer the network to their customers…C-SPAN provides access to the live gavel-to-gavel proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and to other forums where public policy is discussed, debated and decided–all without editing, commentary or analysis and with a balanced presentation of points of view.” C-SPAN provides video, TV, radio and text based content. Video files are searchable. http://www.c-span.org/

FedNet Oversight is a credentialed news organization and the leading provider of Multimedia broadcast of the United States Congress. FedNet maintains a robust video network throughout the Capitol complex for use in broadcast and web-based production. FedNet began broadcasting Congress on the web in 1996 and since that time has broadcast over 5,000 live hearings, thousands of live press conferences and complete, gavel-to-gavel, live coverage of the Senate and House Floor Debates each day.” Subscription only. http://www.fednetoversight.net/

Congress.org. “Congress.org is a non-partisan website dedicated to building a knowledge base for professionals wishing to better engage their communities. Highlighting the latest trends, success stories, effective or creative implementations and more, professionals from a whole host of backgrounds, whether in marketing, government affairs, communications or otherwise, can share their knowledge and gain insight from the larger advocacy community.” http://www.congress.org

GovTrack.us – “GovTrack.us helps you keep tabs on the U.S. Congress. This site is not affiliated with the U.S. government; it is non-commercial, non-partisan, and an open source project….it is an independent tool to help the public research and track the activities in the U.S. Congress, promoting government transparency and civic education through novel uses of technology. You’ll find here the status of U.S. federal legislation, voting records in the Senate and House of Representatives, and information on Members of Congress, as well as congressional committees and the Congressional Record. The site is a research tool, but also a tracking service (providing user specified email updates and RSS feeds).” http://www.govtrack.us/

Roll Call Newspaper Online – free daily online articles and numerous topical blogs – http://www.rollcall.com/

The Hill.com – free Capitol Hill paper that includes blogs (http://thehill.com/blogs/), podcasts and video clips. http://thehill.com/

Congress.gov – From the Library of Congress, legislative information, status of legislation, links to committee reports. https://beta.congress.gov

Washingtonwatch.com tracks the bills in Congress, along with estimates about their costs or savings, when available. http://www.washingtonwatch.com

E-Newsletters, Online Newspapers, Journals and News Sources

Biz Journals – Free Search Watch alerts for registered users. “Bizjournals is the online media division of American City Business Journals, the nation’s largest publisher of metropolitan business newspapers. It operates the Web sites for each of the company’s 41 print business journals.” http://www.bizjournals.com. . See also the The Business Journals Blogs Directory – http://www.bizjournals.com/news/blogs/

Bloomberg – (fee and free) market data, news and commentary (national and international); Bloomberg Radio, Bloomberg TV. http://www.bloomberg.com

CNNMoney.com – [note: Fortune and Money are owned by Time Warner Company; Finance Network and may be linked to from http://money.cnn.com/. This family of magazines is available free online.]

Financial Times – free and fee; email updates and RSS feeds available to subscribers. Daily blog updates, video and podcasts. Comprehensive coverage of global markets. http://www.ft.com/home/us

Forbes – video network, features, blogs, columns, special reports – Europe, US and Asia. Search people, companies, lists. http://www.forbes.com/. See also the Advanced Search page.

Fortune – features, video, RSS, newsletters. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/

Google Finance – Market Summary, Today’s Headlines, Company Facts and Financials, Related company data, a Company Summary, Management info, blog posts and links to topical discussions. http://www.google.com/finance

Investors Business Daily – some free, mostly fee. http://www.investors.com/

The Deal, subscription req’d. “…reports, analyzes and disseminates business and financial news that offers fresh insights on the deal economy.” http://www.thedeal.com/

Time Business – News and views on the economy, markets and business – http://time.com/business

Wall Street Journal – http://online.wsj.com/home-page: registered subscribers may opt-in for email updates, RSS, customized homepage, company and industry news trackers. Each day some articles are available free to readers without a subscription. All WSJ blogs, updated daily, provide reliable news and analysis with links to primary documents, and all are free via http://blogs.wsj.com. There are also corresponding Twitter and RSS feeds.

Wall Street Journal Market Data Center – Free market data, indexes, stock quotes, and more. http://markets.wsj.com/usoverview?mod=topnav_0_0012

Yahoo! Finance – market summaries, currencies, videos, quotes, rates, news features, opinions. https://finance.yahoo.com/

Yahoo! Financial News – top financial news – https://biz.yahoo.com/ne.html. See also Yahoo Finance Originals: Business https://finance.yahoo.com/yahoofinance/business/

Monitoring Trends, Companies and Products – Selected News Aggregators, RSS Feeds, Blog Search Engines

News Aggregators

BBC – excellent resource/how-to guide – popular BBC news feeds, global and UK news feeds, video and audio feeds – services for mobile, connected TV, alerts, e-mail news. http://www.bbc.com/news

Firefox Live Bookmarks – “automatically keeps track of updates for you so you always know when new content has been added to your favorite sites.”. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/livebookmarks.html

Financial Times – RSS and Twitter feeds – http://www.ft.com/rss

Forbes.com RSS Feeds – http://www.forbes.com/fdc/rss.shtml

RSS feeds for Law.com – https://feeds.feedblitz.com/law/law-com-newswire

MarketWatch – http://www.marketwatch.com/rss/default.asp

New York Times Times Topics feeds collect news, reference, photos, graphics, audio and video on thousands of subjects, covering material published since 1981.” – http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/index.html

PR Newswire – http://www.prnewswire.com/rss/

Reuters News RSS Feeds – http://www.reuters.com/tools/rss

Wall Street Journal Digital Network RSS Feeds http://www.wsj.com/public/page/rss_news_and_feeds.html

Washington Post RSS Feeds – http://www.washingtonpost.com/rss

Yahoo! News – Latest News & Headlines – http://news.yahoo.com/rss

Yahoo! Finance provides company news and commentary feeds in RSS – http://finance.yahoo.com/rssindex

Identification of Company Legal Representation

Corporate Counsel (ALM) – http://www.corpcounsel.com/?slreturn=20151120165426

Law.com Surveys and Rankings (Am Law 100, Am Law 200, Global 100, etc.) AmLaw Surveys, Lists, & Rankings (Am Law 100, Am Law 200, Global 100, etc.) – http://www.law.com/insights/rankings

LexisNexis CourtLink – “calendar proceedings (docket) of a lawsuit, and the documents that are filed during the course of that suit” – http://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/courtlink-for-corporate-or-professionals.page

Comprehensive, annotated, up-to-date case law for state and federal jurisdictions, as well a hundreds of current and archival databases on law, government documents, news, and journals via Lexis or Westlaw

Directory of Corporate Affiliations – http://www.corporateaffiliations.com/

Disclosure Online Database-US Public Company Profiles (Lexis), “contains business and financial information extracted from annual and periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for over 10,000 publicly-owned companies” – http://www.lexisone.com/legalresearch/lnbcc/contentlistings/companyfinanciallisting1.html

Verdict Search – Search Over 170,000 Verdicts and case histories, state and nationwide verdicts (fees apply to obtain reports) http://verdictsearch.com/

Note: Law firm websites are a major source of strategic corporate intelligence – firm and practice specific entries, press releases, news alerts, topical blogs – be sure to track and monitor information from within this range of publications after you identify specific value added content.

LexisNexis Search permits users to locate sources, database files, reports and other topical information available via this publisher.

LawCrawler – Legal web and database search engine. http://web.lawcrawler.com/

Martindale.com – Search for lawyers, law firms and organizations, groups and topics, jobs. Results provide name, law firm, job title, link to website with bio and contact info is provided in many instances, city/state/county, telephone number. http://www.martindale.com/

Mergerstat M&A – “The Mergerstat database also includes more than 50,000 International transactions. Mergerstat covers U.S. transactions and crossborder transactions involving a U.S. parent company where the equity value is greater than $1 million and represents at least a 10 percent interest.” http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?156282

Nelson’s Public Company Profiles – “Public Company Profiles comprise brief descriptions of 22,000 publicly traded corporations worldwide and include contact information, key executives and business descriptions.” – http://www.lexisnexis.com/clients/CSCatalog/Site65/desrc_nelsonsPubPro.htm (via Lexis)

Pacer – “The PACER Service Center is the Federal Judiciary’s centralized registration, billing, and technical support center for electronic access to U.S. District, Bankruptcy, and Appellate court records.” Requires username and password – fees apply – http://www.pacer.gov/

Patent records, USPTO – http://patft.uspto.gov/

SDC Mergers & Acquisitions – http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?173725

Secretary of State and Other Business Filings Databases, published by LLRX.com – “All 50 states make some level of corporate and business filings available online. In a few instances only limited information (such as name availability) is retrievable. The majority of the states, however, use their Web presence to disseminate a range of public business records — and many offer access at no charge.” //www.llrx.com/columns/roundup29.htm

SECInfo.com – “Search by Name, Industry, Business, SIC Code, Area Code, Topic, CIK, Accession Number, File Number, Date, ZIP.” http://www.secinfo.com/

Standard & Poor’s Corporate Register, “The SPCORP file, derived from the Standard & Poor’s Register of Corporations, is the most comprehensive directory available of America’s top corporations and their key personnel.” http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?3669

Trademark Electronic Search System, USPTO – http://www.uspto.gov/trademark, fee –

America’s Corporate Finance Directory – http://www.lexisnexis.com/corpfinancedir/ also useful for identification of other outside service providers, including auditor, banker, pension manager, insurance carriers, investment banker, etc.

Westlaw CourtExpress – dockets and document retrieval services for state and federal jurisdictions, http://courtexpress.westlaw.com/

Selected Online Tools for Competitor Monitoring

Website Trackers

ChangeDetection – notifies users every time there is a change in designated websites – http://www.changedetection.com

“Domain Tools has been tracking the whois history of millions of domains since 2000. Domain History gives you access to our massive database of historical whois records. Supported TLDs are .com, .net, .org, .biz, .us, and .info. DomainTools offers an historical lookup of registrations back to 2001,” http://domain-history.domaintools.com/

InfoMinder – subscription service to track and monitor changes to websites, blogs, RSS feeds and wikis – http://www.infominder.com/webminder/index.jsp

MarkMonitor – http://www.markmonitor.com

WebSite Watcher – monitor websites for updates and changes – http://aignes.com

Web2Mail Lite – read, receive and browse the web by email – http://www.web2mail.com/lite/welcome.php

Westlaw and LexisNexis

Benchmarking – Law, Corporate, Government, Market Data

American Bar Association (ABA) Statistics on the Legal Profession – http://www.americanbar.org/resources_for_lawyers/profession_statistics.html

American Lawyer – subscription (law firm and lawyer surveys, reports, articles, market data) – http://www.americanlawyer.com/index.jsp. See also the Law.com Blog Network for free, topical updates: http://www.law.com/jsp/law/lawblogs.jsp

Law.com Surveys, Lists and Rankings – (fee and free) – begin on this page to view the available data, reports, surveys and charts.

Chambers and Partners (fee and free) – “searchable database of the top lawyers in 175 countries, providing independent rankings and editorial commentary” – http://www.chambersandpartners.com/

CorporateAffiliations.com (LexisNexis – subscription only) http://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/corporate-affiliations.page

FRASER (Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research) – “The Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research is a project by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis to expand on its mission to provide economic information and data to researchers interested in the U.S. economy. On this web site you will find links to scanned images (in Adobe Acrobat PDF format) of historical economic statistical publications, releases, and documents.” https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/

Fortune 500 annual ranking of America’s largest corporations – use the drop down menu to access archival data from 1955 to present – http://fortune.com/fortune500/

“The IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook (WCY) “is the world’s most renowned and comprehensive annual report on the competitiveness of nations, ranking and analyzing how a nation’s environment creates and sustains the competitiveness of enterprises…it measures 57 countries on the basis of 329 criteria.” http://www.imd.org/wcc/

Economic Indicators – “Available from April 1995 forward, this monthly publication is prepared by the Council of Economic Advisers for the Joint Economic Committee. It provides economic information on gross domestic product, income, employment, production, business activity, prices, money, credit, security markets, Federal finance, and international statistics. Economic Indicators back to 1948 are made available through FRASER, the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research. FRASER is provided through a partnership between GPO and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. FRASER is not an official version of Economic Indicators and GPO can not guarantee the authenticity or completeness of the data. About Economic Indicators. http://www.census.gov/economic-indicators/

PROFIT Guide– “PROFITguide.com is Canada’s Online Guide to Business Success.” http://www.profitguide.com/

U.S. Census Bureau, Current Industrial Reports [funding terminated in 2012] – “The CIR program has been providing monthly, quarterly, and annual measures of industrial activity for many years. The primary objective of the CIR program is to produce timely, accurate data on production and shipments of selected products. The data are used to satisfy economic policy needs and for market analysis, forecasting, and decision-making in the private sector.” Includes Mining, Manufacturing and Construction Statistics. http://www.census.gov/manufacturing/cir/index.html

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis – “The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) promotes a better understanding of the U.S. economy by providing the most timely, relevant, and accurate economic accounts data in an objective and cost-effective manner.” http://www.bea.gov/

U.S. Commercial Service – Market Research Library – “The U.S. Commercial Service is the trade promotion unit of the International Trade Administration. U.S. Commercial Service trade specialists in 107 U.S. cities and in more than 80 countries work with your company to help you get started in exporting or increase your sales to new global markets.” http://www.buyusainfo.net/adsearch.cfm?search_type=int&loadnav=no

Country Profiles

BBC News Country Profiles – “Full profiles provide an instant guide to history, politics and economic background of countries and territories, and background on key institutions. They also include audio or video clips from BBC archives.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/country_profiles/default.stm

CIA World Factbook – “The World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities. Our Reference tab includes: maps of the major world regions, as well as Flags of the World, a Physical Map of the World, a Political Map of the World, and a Standard Time Zones of the World map.” https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html

Economist.com – Country Briefings – “News, country profiles, forecasts, statistics” on more than 80 countries. http://www.economist.com/topics/

Doing Business – Measuring Business Regulation – World Bank Group: “The Doing Business project provides objective measures of business regulations for local firms in 185 economies and selected cities at the subnational level.” http://www.doingbusiness.org/

guardian.co.uk – World Fact Files: country profiles – click on the interactive map’s pins to read country profiles featured in the Guardian’s World Factfiles. http://www.theguardian.com/global/interactive/2009/apr/18/country-profiles-world-map

Index Mundi, Country Facts – “IndexMundi is a data portal that gathers facts and statistics from multiple sources and turns them into easy to use visuals.” http://www.indexmundi.com/

Library of Congress Country Studies – “This series of profiles of foreign nations is part of the Country Studies Program…The profiles offer brief, summarized information on a country’s historical background, geography, society, economy, transportation and telecommunications, government and politics, and national security.” http://www.loc.gov/collections/country-studies/about-this-collection/

World Bank’s Open Data – “The World Bank’s Open Data initiative is intended to provide all users with access to World Bank data. The data catalog is a listing of available World Bank datasets, include databases, pre-formatted tables and reports. Each of the listings includes a description of the data set and a direct link to that set. Where possible, the databases are linked directly to a selection screen to allow users to select the countries, indicators, and years they would like to search. Those search results can be exported in different formats. Users can also choose to download the entire database directly from the catalog.” Link

World Competitiveness Center – “We are dedicated to the advancement of knowledge on world competitiveness by offering benchmarking services for countries and companies using the latest and most relevant data on the subject.” http://www.imd.org/wcc

IGO and NGO Portals

ESIL – Electronic Information System for International Law – “According to the Union of International Associations (UIA), there are over 50,000 international organizations (IGOs, NGOs and other bodies). An inter-governmental organization (IGO) is generally a public or governmental organization created by treaty or agreement between States. An non-governmental organization (NGO) is established by individuals or associations of individuals. This section of EISIL will focus on core IGOs and resources for locating NGOs. http://www.eisil.org/index.php?sid=595621789&t=sub_pages&cat=15

IGOs and NGOs – Northwestern University Library – “An intergovernmental organization (IGO) is a structure based on a formal instrument of agreement between nations (e.g. the United Nations, the EU). A non-governmental organization (NGO) is a group whose members are individuals or associations (e.g. the International Committee of the Red Cross).The International Documents Collection contains the publications of approximately 25 IGOs and a few NGOs. The International Information Librarian maintains a guide with a comprehensive list of links to IGO web sites. http://www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-collections/evanston-campus/government-information/international-documents/igos-and-ngos#modal-show

NGO Research Guide, Duke University Libraries – “The selection of NGOs listed here primarily reflects the research interests of Duke researchers and students – http://library.duke.edu/research/subject/guides/ngo_guide/ngo_database

SourceWatch Guide to Think Tanks and NGOs in the U.S. and Canada. “A think tank (also called a policy institute) is an organization, institute, corporation, or group that conducts research and engages in advocacy in public policy. Many think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax exempt status. While many think tanks are funded by governments, interest groups, or businesses, some think tanks also derive income from consulting or research work related to their mandate. In some cases, think tanks are little more than public relations fronts, usually headquartered in state or national seats of government and generating self-serving scholarship that serves the advocacy goals of their industry sponsors. Of course, some think tanks are more legitimate than that. Private funding does not necessarily make a researcher a shill, and some think-tanks produce worthwhile public policy research. In general, however, research from think tanks is ideologically driven in accordance with the interests of its funders.” http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Think_tanks

University of Minnesota Human Rights Library – https://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/Wikipedia – Non-profit organizations based in Washington, D.C. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Non-profit_organizations_based_in_Washington,_D.C.

Worldwide NGO Directory – “The World Association of Non-Governmental Organizations (WANGO) is an international organization uniting NGOs worldwide in the cause of advancing peace and global well being. WANGO helps to provide the mechanism and support needed for NGOs to connect, partner, share, inspire, and multiply their contributions to solve humanity’s basic problems. Initiated in 2000 by a handful of international NGOs and prominent visionaries, WANGO has quickly become one of the premier international bodies for non-governmental organizations that are committed to the ideals of universal peace, justice, and well being for all humanity. Concerned with universal values shared across the barriers of politics, culture, religion, race and ethnicity, the founding organizations and individuals envisioned an organization that would enable NGOs to work in partnership across those barriers, thereby weaving a selfless social fabric essential to establishing a worldwide culture of peace. By optimizing resources and sharing vital information, WANGO provides a means for NGOs to become more effective in completing their vital tasks. With its global network of NGOs, as well as affiliates drawn from the ranks of governmental and intergovernmental bodies, business, and universities, WANGO has become an international leader in tackling issues of serious global concern. Click on the region on the map, or click on the region name below the map to list organizations.” http://www.wango.org/resources.aspx?section=ngodir

Research Directories and Portals

A to Z Index of the Business Reference Services Web Site (Library of Congress) – http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/azindex.html

BRINT – “Risk Management for the New Finance and Finance Practitioners” http://www.brint.com/

CEO Express – fee and free, with links to dozens of reliable business, industry, news and and topical resources – http://www.ceoexpress.com/home

HighBeam (fee and free) “is a magazine and newspaper archive, online library and research tool for students and professionals. We collect millions of research articles from 6,500 published sources you know and trust – and put them all in one place.” – http://www.highbeam.com/

HighWire – free and free, “database of links to 1699 journals, books, reference works, & other scholarly publications” http://highwire.stanford.edu/

LexisNexis – fee/subscription – http://www.lexis.com or http://www.nexis.com

MagPortal – search engine and directory for locating online magazine articles from over 200 periodicals – http://www.magportal.com/c/bus/

globalEdge – your source for global business knowledge – “A collection of resources and links to proprietary as well as free databases, guides, and learning tools via Michigan State University – http://globaledge.msu.edu/reference-desk/

Westlaw – fee/subscription – www.westlaw.com

Wall Street Executive Library – Directory of over 1,450 sources that includes: national/international news; company and industry, government, marketing and advertising, statistics and economic research – http://www.executivelibrary.com/

Editor’s Note: This guide was first published on November 20, 2005

Completely revised and updated as follows by Sabrina I. Pacifici on: March 15, 2006, October 13, 2006, January 15, 2007, June 19, 2007, September 28, 2007, March 15, 2008, June 1, 2008, March 28, 2009, October 11, 2009, June 2, 2010, January 2011, March 2011, July 2011, December 2011, July 2012, September 2013 and August 8, 2014, December 18, 2015