New and improved Jigsaw

Its hard to keep up with all the company information sites.  Typically, they provide useful free information and require payment for the valuable corporate nuggets, particularly contact information.  Hoovers is the gold standard and made its reputation with their humorous but sometime banal business summaries.   I like Manta because they provide revenue data for free.  Jigsaw is another one and they’ve just added a tab called “research” which appears to collect web-based information from blogs and social media sites like Facebook and Flicker as well as Google news.  Its useful and easy-to-use.

The thing to remember is there is no one-stop shop for real research.  If you want very basic information, its fine to check out of any of these sites or the company website but if you really want the scoop, you need to look at everything you can in the time you have available.

Sunday Special: Researching Companies by Industry

Proverbial Industrial Plant Belching Scary Smoke!

Search engines are not that great for retrieving data based on industry codes.  The government has set up two detailed industry classification schemes that are extremely useful for pinpointing narrow market niches.  They are the Standard Industrial Classification which the Feds updated with the North American Industrial Classification System.   For proprietary databases like Dun & Bradstreet and many others these systems are very useful to tailoring a search to pull up information say on the video rental businesses making more than $1 million bucks in Des Moines.  Searching for that on the web is virtually impossible. 

Here are some tips:

1.  Utilize both SIC and NAICS when researching.  The Census Bureau collects lots of great data by NAICS codes but not SIC.

2. For researching public companies by industry niche, use SEC Edgar also a federal government agency (go figure!) allows users to search ONLY by SIC. 

3. OSHA also organizes everything by SIC but at least they claim to be working on moving towards NAICS.  

4. Manta.com allows users to search by industry niche and location at a pretty granular level.  They appear to deploy a system based on SIC but its not quite the same and you can’t enter a code but have to search by industry label.

5.  Yahoo Finance  allows you to search by industry designation with a list of more than fifty which isn’t as extensive as SIC or NAIC but better than Google which includes less than 10.