TOOLS

CONTENTS:

• Wage Access Compensation Surveys
• The Scannery: An Update

This site provides national salary and wage averages in a number of fields, from administrative to shipping and receiving. According to the site, “WageAccess™ is an innovative Internet-based multi-industry salary survey that provides state-of-the-art customized results for over 500 benchmark job descriptions in numerous regions and cities across the United States.” The positions covered are not at the executive level, but may be useful for qualifying someone as a high end annual fund donor or disqualifying them as a major donor, based on job title.

http://www.wageaccess.com/ncs/ncs_index.asp

For more salary sites, see the Salary Web Site section of the June 2003 Internet Prospector article entitled "Determining Executive Employment Compensation."

http://www.internet-prospector.org/tool0603.htm

THE SCANNERY: AN UPDATE

In March 2004, I reviewed The Scannery in the Internet Prospector Tools section (http://www.thescannery.com/). Since then, Jos Pols of TimBukOne, sister site to the Scannery, sent an email to Internet Prospector answering the questions I raised about how the Scannery's search function works. His answers and comments are below.”

1) How does The Scannery determine which "top lists" it searches?

The various groups like the U.S. Top 1500 is actually the current S&P 1500 group. The Canada Top 1000 is the list produced by GlobeInvestor in Canada, which ranks companies by asset size. Europe 400 is the S&P 400 group. The Global 1000 is the Business Week Global 1000 ranking by asset size. We thought we would use well-accepted groupings rather than try and make up our own.

2) How does consolidating search results work?

A search for the exact phrase "Bill Gates" in the Global 1000 produces 117 documents with multiple hits per document. Consolidating the search results shows Microsoft as the top site with 84 documents. Similar results are found when searching S&P 1500 and S&P 500.

3) Why did I get so few results from my search for Nike?

In respect to strange results like Nike -- many sites do not allow themselves to be indexed and/or use a flash animation or other login-type script in order to get into their websites. The Scannery search engine cannot get past this type of "front-end" since it requires human intelligence to see what to do. In the case of Nike they have a flash animation front-end. Therefore the only links you will get are where "Nike" is mentioned on other websites indexed by The Scannery.

4) If a site cannot be indexed, can I still search it using The Scannery?

Another (currently) free resource for Internet prospectors is http://www.timbukone.com. A very significant development is the addition of a new "sister" Web site to The Scannery. We found that some users were getting confused when they searched for, as an example, "FORD" but did not find the Ford Motor Company ranking near the top of the results. This is because not all companies allow their Web sites to be indexed at all. Ford is one of them as is IBM, Proctor and Gamble, amongst others. Therefore the only results would be those documents on other Web sites that contain the search phrase.

The TimBukOne website (pronounced Tim Buck One), which requires free registration, allows a user to first choose a country. Then navigate to a specific public company within that country (for which we have a website address). And then perform a search restricted to within just that company's Web site. The user can also directly click through to the company website.

In addition, the user can choose to expand the search to all public companies in that country. For South Africa, our home country, we have additional information including organization charts (very, very nice!), stock charts, news and reports.

The TimBukOne website is more company focused while The Scannery is more country/industry focused. It is our hope that the combination of these two sites will provide a useful service to researchers and investors alike.

Many thanks to Jos for this clarification and the additional information. A final editor’s note -- TimBukOne is free for now, but eventually will become a subscription site.

Chris Mildner

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