November 1999
Internet Prospector
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C O R P O R A T I O N S

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Searching for Corporate Information - Hoover's
CorporateInformation.com
EDGAR AND EDGAR ONLINE

    SEARCHING FOR CORPORATE INFORMATION - HOOVER'S
    Can't help it.  Even though it's not a search engine,
    Hoover's is still my favorite place to go for corporate
    information.  It's not the biggest, and it doesn't include
    some companies I know should be there, but it's still the
    place I check first.  I like their sassy reviews, and they
    tell me about as much as I want (or have time) to know about
    a company when we're breaking our necks to make a deadline.

    I like the format of Hoover's company capsules (free) and
    profiles (fee), and appreciate having all the links to news,
    rankings and financials for each company right up front.

    I'm not crazy about the look of their specially formatted
    "printable" profiles, however (available to subscribers).
    The font is way too small and the format too stylized.
    Wish the paying customers could also get a "clean" printable
    copy with the larger font size and un-fancy format.

    Hoover's does a pretty good job of keeping their information
    updated, so I generally feel confident about what I find
    there.  Other things I really like:

    * The List of Lists -- companies, people, products, places, 
      grouped by The Best, The Biggest and The Emerging
    * The News Center
    * The "people" search feature, in addition to seven other
      types of searches 
    * Direct links to each company's home page from the capsules * Lots of officers listed, with salaries.  Wish they
      also included directors

    I don't know if I'm the only one, but I can't find my way
    around Hoover's newly re-designed site as well as I could
    the old one.  Maybe I'm not the only one, because they've
    had to add a little cheat-sheet on the front page to lead us
    to our old favorites.  I do appreciate the new features but
    hope the site doesn't get over-grown.  They became my
    favorite site by being simple, straightforward and fun.
    http://www.hoovers.com

    CORPORATEINFORMATION.COM
    Here's proof that good things can come in BIG packages, too.
    CorporateInformation.com is both a metasite AND a search 
    engine. It's great for researching all kinds of companies 
    -- foreign or domestic, publicly traded or privately held. 
    This is corporate information the way researchers like it. 
    Read the User's Manual to be impressed by what you have 
    here: http://www.corporateinformation.com/manual.html 

    * This engine searches through more than 300,000 company 
      profiles, at sites around the world. What a time-saver 
      for researchers! Only profiles are indexed here, so 
      profiles is what you get, all without having to wade 
      through the extraneous results returned by traditional 
      search engines. There are profiles on over 20,000 public 
      companies around the world.
    * CorporateInformation is loved for its links -- over 1,000
      financial sites, organized by country, are linked to this 
      site. U.S. companies are further categorized by state and 
      sector, and as public and private entities.

    * Nice touches:
      - An extensive Company Extension Guide, if you've ever
        wondered what GmbH or S.A. de C.V. means, for example
      - Links to corporate research reports, industry overviews,
        currency exchange rates and international economic info 
      - Some sites allow searching of court decisions
      - Links to Patent Office, EPA and OSHA information

    To give credit where it's due, this page was built and is
    maintained by George Regnery of the Winthrop Corp.  It was
    designated as the Editors' Choice by EContent (formerly 
    DATABASE) in October 1999.  See Mary Ellen Bates' good 
    review (including a trial search), accessed from the 
    EContent button on CorporateInformation's front page.
    http://www.corporateinformation.com/

    EDGAR AND EDGAR ONLINE
    My, how you've grown!  Hard to believe that EDGAR was born such a short time ago (in 1993) as a pilot project to 
    provide the public with free Internet access to SEC data.
    Internet Prospector retold the story in its  "EDGAR & Family" special feature in the September 1998 Prospector:
    ". . . the grass-roots movement powered by librarians,
    Ralph Nader activists, the press and others . . . opened 
    free access to Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and
    Retrieval . . . EDGAR."

    In response to user demand and the high volume of new
    registrants, EDGAR is undergoing some restructuring.  One
    of the changes: All filings will be organized by year, as
    well as by company or fund. See: 
    http://www.sec.gov/edgarhp.htm

    Instructions for general and special-purpose searches 
    can be found at: http://www.sec.gov/edaux/searches.htm

    The commercial enterprises that scrambled to re-package this
    data in useful formats now seem to be eating each other.
    In September 1999, EDGAR Online acquired FreeEDGAR.com.  According to the press release, "The combined entity will be the primary source of EDGAR-based information to most of the high-traffic and business Web sites on the Internet."

    Some of their value-added services that honestly are of help
    to researchers are IPO Express, EDGAR Online People (for 
    researching corporate executives and directors) and EDGAR 
    Online Personal, for real-time Web and email based alerting.

    A victim of the EDGAR wars, New York University's NYU EDGAR site, reviewed last year, is no longer available.
    http://www.edgar-online.com 

    Beverly Goodwin

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