Search Tip Report: Information You Can Use

A monthly newsletter from Eipert Information Services

April/May 2004 Number 4

Search Tips Report was a free email newsletter from Eipert Information Services, featuring practical tips about business and sci/tech information sources and research strategy for you to apply in your own business. See the archive of past issues.

In This Issue

* Niche search engines for business research
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Niche search engines for business research

As an alternative to searching Google or one of the other large generalist search engines, consider a niche, or subject-specific, search engine that crawls and searches just a portion of the Web. Niche search engines can save time because the search results are from a selected part of the Web, and hence can be expected to be more pertinent.

The trick here is finding an appropriate specialty search engine. Start by using the website directories suggested in February's "Search Tip Report" (http://www.eipertinfo.com/newsletter/newsletter2004-02.htm#subject) to find subject specific sites, or portals. These sites can have a variety of approaches to finding information; they often have directories to relevant external websites, they may include databases of valuable internal information, and some have a niche search engine. Findlaw is a good example of a subject specific site with multiple types of access to internal and external legal information, including a niche search engine, called Lawcrawler (http://lawcrawler.findlaw.com), that searches legal websites.

Following is a short list of representative niche search engines useful in business research.

** Government sites:

Limit your search to just those websites provided by U.S. or state government agencies in several different ways. The official site is FirstGov, http://www.firstgov.com, which can be used to search U.S. federal government sites, state sites, or only one state. FirstGov can also be searched by Vivisimo's search engine, http://vivisimo.com/projects/FirstGov, which clusters search results into categories. Another option is Google's UncleSam (http://www.google.com/unclesam), which limits search results to those from U.S. federal and military sites.

** Nonprofit sector:

Sector Search (http://fdncenter.org/funders/web_search/web_search.html), from the Foundation Center, searches the websites of private foundations, corporate grant makers, grant making public charities, community foundations, nonprofit organizations, and government resources.

** Catalogs and products:

Sites intended to find the best deal when shopping for a particular item could also be useful for locating information about competitors' products. Find out the names of companies that are making a particular product, or check out retail pricing and the ways a product is being promoted. Google has two beta options: Froogle (http://froogle.google.com) searches online store catalogs; Google Catalogs (http://catalogs.google.com) searches scanned mail-order catalogs. See descriptions of other shopping search engines, including BizRate (http://www.bizrate.com/) and DealTime (http://www.dealtime.com) at SearchEngineWatch (http://searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156331).

** E-commerce academic articles and white papers:

eBizSearch (http://www.ebizsearch.org) is a specialty search engine that searches university, commercial organization, research institute, and government sites for information concerning business and technology aspects of e-Business. The relatively small set of sources includes articles, white papers, working papers, etc. The details shown in a result include an abstract and links to citations to the document. This is an example of the type of enhancements that can be added when a search universe is small.

** Others:

Search engines that search only news, or only blogs, are specialty search sites that merit an entire column, but a couple examples are News Now (http://www.newsnow.co.uk/) and Feedster (http://www.feedster.com/).

Watch for specialty search sites offered by the major search engines. Google has sites that search Apple Macintosh, Linux, and Microsoft related content. See Topic Specific Searches at the bottom of the page: http://www.google.com/advanced_search?.

At HighBeam Web Research (http://www.highbeam.com/web/index.asp?refid=rville_down), create your own set of sites to search by choosing from a limited number of useful websites.

In the course of searching the web, other specialty search engines will undoubtedly turn up. Knowing that they exist, and how useful they can be, should make you more alert to search engines found.

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