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.
Reading Tea Leaves by Randy Wilson 