One last point: Help-wanted ads are a very underrated source of business intelligence. They offer great clues about where a company is heading in its pursuit of markets and technologies. CareerPath.com http://www.careerpath.com and the Monster Board http://www.monsterboard.com are two sites that our analysts use all the time. Companies are between a rock and a hard place here. Most of them desperately need talented people, so they have to advertise their openings aggressively. But the more jobs they post, the more they expose themselves to people like us, who know how to analyze the postings. If you examine the kinds of backgrounds that a company looks for in its systems people, you can get a good sense of its technical infrastructure.
Friedman: You can't talk about competitive intelligence on the Web without talking about search engines. I've had the most success with Excite http://www.excite.com , which lets you start with a broad search and then narrow it. Say a search unearths a Web site that's really valuable. You click on a button ("More Like This"), and Excite immediately searches for items related to that site. It's a nice feature.
Edwards: Search engines are a mystery. A few months ago, a colleague of mine did a training class on using the Internet. She had everyone in the class plug the same query into AltaVista http://www.altavista.digital.com - and every single one of them got a different result. The same colleague did a search that morning and got a bunch of hits. She did the same search in the afternoon and came up empty. I guess the moral of the story is, don't take "no" for an answer.
Scott: I use AltaVista. It gets me to the hard-and-fast business stuff that I expect to find. I also use MetaCrawler http://www.metacrawler.com , one of the leading "meta" search engines. It gets me to stuff that I don't expect to find: obscure newsletters, reports that aren't officially sanctioned by companies or research firms - material that AltaVista often doesn't produce.
Fuld: It's so obvious that I'm reluctant to say it: If you want to find out about your competitors, spend time with their home pages. Home pages are such an obvious resource that people often don't take them seriously. I've been spending time with the home page for Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer-products company http://www.unilever.com . It's a great place to gather intelligence on that company. It includes all kinds of data about R&D operations: where they are, what they specialize in. You can take that information and go to the IBM Patent Server http://www.patents.ibm.com , which archives 2 million patent citations. You'll make some interesting connections and see how Unilever is using its scientific resources. That's just one example.
Some companies go into real depth about their structure and leadership - complete with org charts of different departments and bios of executives. Unilever's site is like a AAA Trip-tik: It allows outsiders to navigate through the organization. When a company lets people post personal home pages, you really get a feel for their personalities and intentions. These pages can be extremely valuable. They're also a headhunter's dream!
Freidman: Our competitors' home pages are among my first stops. I'm really thorough about going through them. If you really push on them - if you focus on the minutiae and make interesting connections - you can generate valuable insights. We do business in 170 countries. Home pages can give you a quick take on what your competitor is selling in Argentina or who its partners are in Belgium.
Scott: Home pages are valuable. But they also contain lots of misleading information. On the Web, there's no such thing as definitive truth; there are just too many people talking. And companies tend to post only their most optimistic messages. If you're worried about when a competitor is going to release a new product, and all you do is track press releases on its home page - well, don't be surprised when the product launches much later than those releases suggested it would. All the detail on the Web can be deceiving. Once, on a company's site, I read specs for a new product, complete with engineering drawings, and then I called someone at the company, who said, "We haven't started building it yet."
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