Go Beyond Google Gathering Internet Intelligence Final (Ebook)

Copyright 2010 by Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only
exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Visit www.cascadeinsights.com
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: June 2010
ISBN- 978-0-615-37786-5
Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google
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About Cascade Insights

Sean Campbell and Scott Swigart are the co-owners of Cascade Insights. Together, they have built two
different businesses over the past 10 years, in the broad arena of technology industry-focused
marketing and consulting.
Their first business, founded in 1999, was a technical consultancy whose clients included some of the
largest companies in the software and hardware fields. While building 3 Leaf, Sean and Scott also wrote
three books on best practices in the technology industry, two of which were published by Microsoft
Press and one by Intel. After growing and developing the company over six years, Sean and Scott sold it
and founded Cascade Insights.
Cascade Insights, founded in 2006, focuses on providing competitive intelligence, qualitative market
research, and strategic marketing services to clients in the hardware and software industries so that
they can more effectively assess, compete with and beat the competition. The firm specializes in
projects that require:
Software or hardware product/industry knowledge

Understanding of business-to-business sales and marketing dynamics
Solid secondary research from non-marketing sources (forums, blogs, technical webcasts,
presentations, etc.)
Interviews with the users or implementers of your product and competing products in your
space
Recruiting hard-to-reach individuals, including developers, senior architects, implementers, and
executive decision makers
sean@cascadeinsights.com / scott@cascadeinsights.com
Twitter: @sean_campbell and @scottswigart
Newsletter: http://www.cascadeinsights.com/newsletter
tel: 503.898.0004
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Table of Contents
About Cascade Insights ....................................................................................................................... 3
Forward .................................................................................................................................................... 6
Competitive Intelligence and Search Skills ............................................................................................... 7
Why This Book is Needed Right Now ........................................................................................................ 7
Chapter 1: Organizations and People............................................................................................. 8

LinkedIn ..................................................................................................................................................... 8
XING ........................................................................................................................................................ 18
Facebook ................................................................................................................................................. 18
Job Postings............................................................................................................................................. 19
Chapter 2: Web Site Analysis........................................................................................................... 26

Xinu Returns ............................................................................................................................................ 26
Compete.com Web site statistics......................................................................................................... 27
Quantcast ................................................................................................................................................ 28
Network Solutions WhoIs..................................................................................................................... 29
PostRank ................................................................................................................................................. 30
Yahoo! Site Explorer................................................................................................................................ 31
Technorati ............................................................................................................................................... 32
Wordle .................................................................................................................................................... 33
Chapter 3: Industry, Topic, and Company Tracking ............................................................... 35

Twitter ..................................................................................................................................................... 35
Slideshare ................................................................................................................................................ 41
Google Alerts........................................................................................................................................... 42
Change Detection.................................................................................................................................... 42
Silobreaker .............................................................................................................................................. 43
Yahoo! Site Explorer................................................................................................................................ 44
Yahoo! Developer Query Language ........................................................................................................ 45
Financial Information .............................................................................................................................. 45
Pirate Radio Communities ................................................................................................................... 46
Archive.org (Also Known As The Wayback Machine) ......................................................................... 47
Chapter 4: Information on Countries, Populations, etc. ........................................................ 50

CIA World Fact Book ............................................................................................................................... 50
NationMaster .......................................................................................................................................... 51
Chapter 5: Map Data ........................................................................................................................... 52

Google Maps ........................................................................................................................................... 52
Bing Maps................................................................................................................................................ 54
Bing and Google Maps ............................................................................................................................ 54
ERSI.......................................................................................................................................................... 56
Chapter 6: Federal, State, and Local Data ................................................................................... 58

FedStats.gov ............................................................................................................................................ 58
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Census ..................................................................................................................................................... 59
Campaign Contributions ......................................................................................................................... 61
Chapter 7: People Searching ........................................................................................................... 62

NNDB ....................................................................................................................................................... 62
Muckety Map .......................................................................................................................................... 63
Social Mention ........................................................................................................................................ 63
Chapter 8: MetaSearch Engines ...................................................................................................... 64

Dogpile .................................................................................................................................................... 64
Clusty ....................................................................................................................................................... 64
Wolfram Alpha ........................................................................................................................................ 65
Chapter 9: Google Tips ...................................................................................................................... 67

Search Box Tips ....................................................................................................................................... 67
Show Options....................................................................................................................................... 71
Google Custom Search ............................................................................................................................ 75
Newstimeline .......................................................................................................................................... 77
FastFlip .................................................................................................................................................... 77
Google Insights for Search ...................................................................................................................... 78
Google Reader......................................................................................................................................... 80
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Forward
How often do you search the Web?
Over the last 15 years, the business world has seen the Web go from irrelevant to essential. Individuals
with almost every job title now search the Web on a daily basis, making it the reference desk for the
masses.
As Jeska Dzwigalaski of Linden Lab puts it, Google makes us simultaneously smarter and stupider. Got a
question? With instant access to practically every piece of information ever known to humankind, we
take for granted that we're only a quick Web search away from the answer. But if we take for granted
that the information is out there, why is it often so difficult to find? How often do we walk away from
the computer with that terrible feeling that the information was out there, we just didnt find it?
Peter Griffiths, the Former Head of Information at the Home Office within the Office of the Chief
Information Officer in the United Kingdom, seems to lay the blame at our feet: Its not Googles fault if
users create stupid queries. To be more precise, unthinking use of the Internet, and in particular
untutored use of Google, has the ability to make us stupid, but that is not a foregone conclusion.
As competitive intelligence professionals, we use Google and a wide variety of other Web-based tools to
find very specific pieces of information, answer critical business questions, and support broader
marketing and sales initiatives. In short, we help companies accelerate their sales and overall market
share in their niche or industry.
Weve written this book because everyone who goes to work and finds themselves staring at the search
box can use our techniques to Go Beyond Google and get much more out of the Web in far less time.
If any of the following information needs seem relevant to your work, then this book is for you:
Information on competitors. Current and future strategy, tactics, products, acquisitions,

expansion or contraction, challenges, opportunities, culture, morale, wages, promotions, and
marketing.
Information on customers. Major initiatives, current and future businesses lines, expansion,
cost cutting, hiring, layoffs, challenges, needs, mergers, and acquisitions.
Information on key individuals. Organizational roles, responsibilities, initiatives, goals,
ideologies, politics, interests, and quotes.
Information on industry trends. Where new trends are heading, who is backing them, and who
is attempting to slow them down.
Our goal is to help you pull the pearls of information you are searching for out from the obscure
recesses of your search results so they are front and center. In the process, you will also learn to find
information that you previously didnt know was available about the subjects youre researching.
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Competitive Intelligence and Search Skills

Competitive intelligence uses many tools and methodologies to answer key business questions, but a
key component is better utilization of the free resources available on the Web. Most competitive
intelligence questions can be answered, at least in part, by simply using the Web resources that are
available to everyone.
Weve spent years picking through the plethora of Web tools, experimenting to find the best fits for
niche tasks to reveal a wealth of information. In this book, we present the tools that we think are the
most useful to a broad range of business professionals who need to cut through the clutter and get
answers out of the World Wide Web.
Why This Book is Needed Right Now

So why this book, right now? The simple reality is that times have changed. Back in the day (only a
couple of years ago), you were probably the office Internet guru if you could do more than using a few
search engines in a rudimentary manner. The bar has now been raised, and there are new opportunities
afoot.
By the time youre finished reading this book, youll be able to bring forth the hidden secrets of the
Internet.
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Chapter 1: Organizations and People

In competitive intelligence, one often needs information about a competitors products, how the
company sells and markets them, and how those products are likely to evolve.
Its also important to understand the company itself. How big is it? Whats its annual revenue? Is it
profitable? Is it hiring and expanding or laying off and contracting? Whats the company culture? Hows
morale?
One can also look at a company more strategically. Is it trying to be bought? Is it acquiring other
companies? What strategy is it following? How does it define success? Is it planning or engaging in
competitive promotions? Is it planning on entering and disrupting an existing market?
Finally, a company is really a collection of people, and its often very useful to understand key
individuals. What are they focusing on? What are their priorities? Even their personal interests can be
relevant.
Although we gather this information for competitive intelligence, you can see that this information is
broadly applicable. Investment firms want this same information on companies theyre considering (or
maintaining) investments in. When one company considers acquiring another, they want as much
information as possible about whats going on inside. Journalists often need to gather background
information about companies for news stories. Attorneys may collect such information to support
litigation. Even a potential employee is well advised to do his or her homework on companies before
they apply for a job.
In this chapter, youll see that you have powerful tools at your disposal that you can use to quickly start
digging into people and companies.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is one of the better-known sites for business networking. To put it another
way, its a key place where people build living resumes not only of their accomplishments, career
history, and connections, but also references, status updates, presentations theyve developed (via
Slideshare integration), and a host of other interesting things that go beyond the one-pager youre
told to write in college.
You can obtain a basic LinkedIn account for free, but an upgrade to a paid account (ranging from $25.00
to upwards of $200.00 a month) provides access to more advanced functionality that delivers a variety
of other benefits.
From a competitive intelligence standpoint, LinkedIn is much more than simply a place to hang your
digital CV. Some of the most important areas on LinkedIn that you can mine for competitive intelligence
are the LinkedIn Company pages, LinkedIn Q/A pages, LinkedIn Groups, and InMails.
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LinkedIn Company Pages

Over the last few years, LinkedIn, has begun to aggregate the data from their user base into higher order
sources of information such as the Company pages section of the site:
Company pages on LinkedIn can contain a wealth of information. LinkedIn builds this company profile by
aggregating information from the millions of LinkedIn users. While not every employee has a LinkedIn
profile, the free information on LinkedIn is arguably more useful in some ways than paid services such as
Hoovers. On the LinkedIn company pages, you can find information about:
Recent Hires
Recent Promotions within the company
A summary of the company, which is typically populated by the company itself
A list of former employees
Office locations and an indication of how many people work at that location
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Other companies that employees typically come from and go to

Company size
Revenue
Year founded
Common job titles at the company
Top schools that employees at the company have graduated from
Median age of company employees
Ratios of males and females at the company
Recent job postings on LinkedIn
What follows is an example profile for Citrix Systems:
At a glance, you can see information on some of the divisions within the company, recent acquisitions,
and the career path employees had both before and after becoming part of Citrix.
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The next screen shot shows the key statistics block that appears on company pages:
The statistic block shows information about common job titles, median age of company employees, top
schools attended, average male/female demographic breakdown, company size, year founded, top
office locations, and a wealth of other information.
As seen in the following image, you can also determine who is a new hire at the company. There are
associated sections for popular profiles, recent former employees, and current employees who have
LinkedIn profiles:
This type of information can be incredibly valuable when placed in the right context. For example,
LinkedIn Company pages easily reveal the identities of individuals who have recently departed. Those
former employees could be good targets for conversations to help you better understand whats going
on at the company. They could also be a good way to get a sense of the companys culture, if you are
considering a job opening at the company.
The ability to determine the footprint of office locations is also critical. Its not uncommon for service
providers to make unsubstantiated claims such as having an office in every major city, on every
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continent. LinkedIn makes it easy to determine whether if those offices are well-staffed locations or
nothing more than a series of local phone numbers. That insight can provide a good sense of a
companys center of mass as well as potential areas where their field sales and marketing may be
weak.
For mid to smaller-size companies, it can be difficult to determine the year in which the company was
founded, particularly if the organization just appeared on your radar. Questions arise in such situations
about whether the company has simply been out of sight and out of mind, or if they are truly a new
player.
There are also advanced searches available for use on LinkedIn, such as the following:
google ccompany:Microsoft
The above search will show you all current Microsoft employees who have Google in their profile
(suggesting that they formerly worked at Google). You can use pcompany instead of ccompany to
find people who used to work for a particular company.
Because past experience can tend to predict future behavior, it is also valuable to consider the
employment history of new hires. For example, if a competitor moves someone with a sales background
into a marketing role, they are likely to have a good sense of the sales motion within the company, but
they may not be able to bring traditional marketing assets to bear as quickly as someone else might.
You can also look at individual sales team hires to see what type of background and account base they
sold to in previous roles. If sales and business development personnel havent protected their
connections from view (and many dont), you can get a fairly clear view of the accounts they have strong
connections to.
You can see whether they seem to focus on certain kinds of accounts, industries, or solution types, as
well as what levels of an organization they typically connect to (and sell at). If they have a lot of VPs in
their LinkedIn rolodex, you can bet theyve met a few of them. If all they have are lower-level managers,
that is probably who they were selling to in the past.
Its also very important to notice when a company is changing the type of sales person or engineer they
are hiring. While this type of research is a bit more longitudinal in nature, it can give you a sense of
whether they are building new technology or changing what sales teams are expected to sell.
For example, if you are concerned that a competitor may start building software for the iPhone, you
should track whether they begin posting job openings for iPhone developers. As you monitor the
number of people hired into the company with iPhone development experience, you can get an idea of
the size of their investment.
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Obviously, the same points are true when looking at moves that are higher up in the food chain, such as
director level or above. Reviewing the following data points for significant senior new hires is a valuable
start:
Past work history

Past accomplishments, such as top seller, top marketer, industry awards, and association awards
Depth and reach of business network
Presentations they may have authored and added to LinkedIn via Slideshare
Tweets that they may have posted about their LinkedIn status
Personal blogs they may host and commonly link to from LinkedIn
The amount of time they spent at every previous job; this is less of an issue than it was 20 years
ago but still an important indicator of future direction and progress for the new hire
How they sell themselves on their profile
Recommendations (which can be quite lengthy and insightful) from previous colleagues,
managers, or subordinates
Note that you do not have to have a large company as your target for this type of research to work.
The screenshot below is focused on a company called Right Now technologies. We randomly selected
this company simply because they fit into the 750-or-so employee size bracket:
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In our experience, LinkedIn is reliable for companies as small as 500 employees. Below 500 people, youll
still find useful information, but you should expect gaps.
Following Companies
LinkedIn also gives you the ability to follow companies and receive an update once a week as
information about the company changes. To do so, simply click the star icon next to the Follow
Company link on a Companys LinkedIn home page.
LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Groups have been growing at a fantastic rate since their initial launch. A LinkedIn Group allows
users who share a common passion to connect via discussion boards and news updates. Many of the
LinkedIn groups tend to be organized around a particular profession (e.g., IT support, Marketing), a
discipline (e.g., Qualitative Market Research), or a technology (e.g., Linux, Mobile Devices, Windows 7).
The discussion within such a group tends to be highly focused on the groups particular passion, which
typically makes it easy to use group members past postings to learn how they feel about a business
trend, technology trend, or industry.
You also have the ability to follow an individuals comments and see whenever they comment in
groups that you both belong to. Therefore, once you find someone who is particularly insightful on a
given subject, you can easily follow their activity to keep abreast of their current thinking.
This set of capabilities makes it easy to identify experts on virtually any subject. To follow up, you can
research other places they appear, such as whether they have a blog or are active on Twitter, and you
can also reach out to them directly through LinkedIn.
LinkedIn recently launched a profile organizer that allows users to save the profiles of individuals of
interest. While it has only limited tagging and filing capabilities at this point, it is nevertheless valuable
and seems likely to be augmented with new functionality in the future.
LinkedIn Status Updates
Users of LinkedIn have begun to take increasing advantage of LinkedIns status update feature, which
allows them to easily tell the world what they are working on, focused on, or passionate about on any
given day:
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Many LinkedIn users fail to grasp that a competitive intelligence analyst can gain tremendous insight
about them by combining status updates theyve made over time with the information in their LinkedIn
bio and other information available about them on the Web.
A simple status update such as Im working on a deal with our largest partner and things look good can
reveal more than a person intends, if an analyst uses other sources to investigate it. LinkedIn has also
connected with Twitter so that a users Tweets can also show up as LinkedIn status updates.
LinkedIn Q/A
One of the most undervalued resources on LinkedIn is the LinkedIn Q/A section of the site. Over the past
couple of years, it has grown into a large database of Q/As on B2B and B2C-related topics. Questions
cover a broad range of business-focused, marketing-focused, and technology-focused topics:
The density of information found on LinkedIn Q/As makes them useful for many different types of
research.
First, the Q/As are very useful when coming up to speed on a new area. Given that LinkedIn Q/As are
typically asked and answered by individuals who are seeking to promote their competency on the
subject at hand, relatively good information is often available from this resource. While due diligence is
of course required in terms of validating that information, a long-running Q/A thread with a number of
different answers may have already provided some verification and context.
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LinkedIn Q/As can also be a source of human intelligence targets, as LinkedIn nicely aggregates
information such as the Top Experts overall and in specific categories:
LinkedIn Search Tips

In addition to its commonly used basic search functionality, LinkedIn also provides more advanced
search capabilities. The basic search box at the top of the page can be used to look for users, but clicking
the Advanced link next to the basic search box provides a range of additional options. Some of these
are only available to users who have paid for higher levels of access to LinkedIn.
Some examples of searches you can make utilizing the advanced search tool include constraining a
search by certain keywords, such as location (e.g., within a given number of miles of a zipcode), a
current or past title, company, or even the school that the user attended. You can also constrain search
results further by industries, the size of the company the user is in (11-50 employees, 501-1000
employees, 10,000+ employees, etc.); whether the company is a member of the Fortune 500, Fortune
100, etc., and many other search parameters.
You can also automate saved searches so that new results of a search youve set up will be mailed to
you on a weekly or monthly basis. You can use this facility to alert you when individuals leave or join a
certain company, are promoted to certain positions, and many other factors, within a given industry or
geographic area, for example.
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Another way you can search LinkedIn, beyond the basic search box and advanced query builder, is
through the use of advanced search keywords. Knowing these can speed up your searches and make
them more effective:
Fname: first name

lname: last name
Ctitle: current title
Ptitle: past title
Pcompany: previous company
Ccompany: current company
School: school attended
Country: country resided in
Zip: zip code
Radius: associated with country and zip and then 10, 25, 35, etc. up to 100
Interest: interests
Joined: date joined
One last way you can mine LinkedIn is from the outside using a search engine such as Google. Many of
LinkedIns company and individual profile pages are available for search engines to index, so you can
utilize properly formatted queries to mine that information. Consider the following:
"Founded, * 1999..2001" site:linkedin.com/companies/*
That search in Google provides a list of companies on LinkedIn that were founded in the time period of
1999 through 2001.
To break down the query a bit, Founded * 19992001 tells Google that you want to search for the
text Founded, and 19992001 means that youre looking for a number from 1999 to 2001. Finally,
the asterisk (called a wildcard) means that you dont care what is between Founded and the year.
This syntax matches the pattern for how LinkedIn displays information about when a company was
founded:
The final part of the query, site:linkedin.com/companies/*, tells Google that you want to constrain
search to only look at the pages that are within the Companies section of the LinkedIn site. This
addition to the search prevents results from other Web sites and other parts of LinkedIn (e.g., user
profile pages).
Using the same pattern above, following are a few additional examples:
"median age, * 40..45 years" site:linkedin.com/companies/*

"Male, * 20..30 %" site:linkedin.com/companies/*
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"* after: * VMware" site:linkedin.com/companies/*
The first query in the list returns companies where the median age of company employees is from 40 to
45 years old, the second shows you companies where the percentage of male employees ranges from
20% to 30%, and the third shows you companies where the majority of the employees used to work at
VMware before moving to their current company.
It is also possible to utilize similar types of searches for individual user profiles. Instead of
site:linkedin.com/companies/*, you would use, site:linkedin.com/in/pub.
XING
XING (www.xing.com) is a European-focused site similar to LinkedIn. Although localized versions of
LinkedIn result in many entries for certain areas such as Germany, Spain, and the UK, countries such as
Poland do not have localized versions of LinkedIn. Because of its focus on the European market, XING
can be helpful in that regard:
Facebook
While Facebook (www.facebook.com) is a source of information on individuals that youve associated
with in the past, the type of information typically shared on the site prevents it from being a very robust
tool for locating business information. That said, it is very useful to have a Facebook profile on which
you stay relatively active as a means for staying connected with others and finding additional profile
information.
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Job Postings
Job postings can provide an excellent source of information, particularly when you monitor
organizations that have not recognized the amount of information that a job posting can leak.
The general value of job postings in this regard is augmented by the fact that, if organizations want to
entice someone to take a position at their company, they have an interest in making the position appear
attractive. In addition, for more technical roles, the organization has to be clear about the technical skills
required. Many organizations provide a wealth of detail in job postings, without realizing how much
information they are communicating about their future intentions.
Some examples of information that is often available in job postings include the following:
Current and future product development areas

The health of a particular division within a company
The growth of a new division within a company
Potential market or sales targets or strategies
Strategic partners or new partners of some importance to the organization
Regions around the world (or within a country) that are being targeted for new growth
The example below comes from Ars Technica, which is well known for providing product reviews and
related information. Ars Technica analysts decided to see what they could learn about Microsofts
operations related to Windows 8. Using information from job postings and LinkedIn profiles, they
discovered disclosures of unannounced features for the upcoming operating system:
While such information may not unerringly reveal the features that will eventually appear, it provides an
instructive example of the kinds of information that can be gleaned from public information. If such data
points are collected over time, a fairly accurate picture can often be pieced together.
This sort of research is conducted very frequently in many industries, particularly when employees
attempting to provide proof and credibility about their skill sets leak information about the company
and its intentions.
Not too long ago, we heard that IBM had embarked on an endeavor to determine who a competitors
customers were and how much the competitor was selling to them. The method they chose to
determine the level of activity was quite novel. IBM decided to scrape together all of the resumes they
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could find from individuals who currently or recently worked at the competitors they were profiling. IBM
then looked at all of the times a sales or business development people made statements in their
resumes such as the following:
I managed the account for XYZ Widgets and increased the total share of the account 40% over
one year
I grew our relationship with the two Fortune 500 accounts in my region by 50% year over year
I maintained a relationship with XYZ Company, ABC Company, and LMQ Company for a period
of two years as a Strategic Account Manager.
Serviced customers including XYZ Company, ABC Company, etc. With these companies
achieved 108% yearly quota on a $9.5 million goal.
IBM used all of these resumes to create a computer model that generated a heat map of competitor
activity. While an individual may have a far smaller scope of resources than what is described above, this
example illustrates the tremendous depth of information that is available to you. And depending on the
scope of what you are looking for, Excel and some good search techniques might be all you need to
meet your goals. For example, a competitor may list sales targets in their job posting. A sales persons
LinkedIn profile may say who their key accounts are and the amount they sell to them annually.
You can even reverse-engineer a competitors customer list with job postings and LinkedIn profiles. For
example, if a company job posting says, Must have experience with ACME X, then you know that
company is a customer of ACME. In a LinkedIn profile, if you read, Worked at company Y where I used
ACME X to then, again, you know that company is an ACME customer. If you work in a small market
and someone just recently hired a salesperson, the job posting might reveal their sales targets, strategic
focus, what industries they are focused on, and even pain points in the sales cycle (e.g., requires
travel, requires a sales person with experience with x sales methodology, etc.).
Beyond sales motion and sales activity, you can also discern a great deal of a companys current
technology investment and their technology roadmap from job postings and resumes of recent and
current employees.
Even if the company doesnt operate in the technology sector per se, the technology it has or doesnt
have in house can still dictate some of their direction and how fast they can move. Companies whose
job postings indicate the use of outdated mail, database, or operating systems are likely not to be fast
movers in some regards.
Job postings can also reveal strategy and product plans. A good example is a Netflix job posting that
disclosed plans to make a media player for Android based devices (cell phones, tablets, netbook
computers, etc.).
The first sentence of the job posting, Netflix is looking for a great engineer to help us build Instant
Streaming client implementations on Android devices, revealed a key strategy that Netflix had not
intended to publicly disclose. This type of inadvertent disclosure is quite common. Note that, from the
point of view of HR or the hiring manager, the posting simply states the requirements of the position
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and avoids inappropriate applications. On the other hand, from the point of view of a product marketing
or competitive strategy group, such job postings represent inappropriate leaks of confidential
information.
Another example of the value of job postings is that they can help you divine when a company is about
to birth a new division. When a new division is created, a director-level or VP-level position is often
created to oversee it, before many employees are reallocated from other positions within the company
or hired externally.
Therefore, the first sign of a new organization being built inside a company is often the job posting for
that new director or VP role. Many times, in an attempt to attract capable candidates, these job postings
provide a clear understanding of job responsibilities and their importance to the larger organization.
Examples weve seen include the following:
Grow the nascent virtualization initiatives we have to $500M in sales over a period of five
years.
Build strategic alliances and partnerships with OEMs. This is new ground for the company.
This new online services division will focus on providing leading edge cloud-based services to
the small and medium business segment. Goals are to be a top-three player in our market within
the next three to five years.
As the organization under the VP is built out, more details about the business segment will emerge in
subsequent postings. Even the number of postings is informative. Suddenly hiring 20 new sales people
or programmers indicates a major new effort.
Job Posting Aggregation
Determining that a company has posted jobs can be difficult. Companies can post them on their own
site, LinkedIn, Monster, and a number of other Web locations. Moreover, some jobs are posted by third
parties, and such postings are often anonymized to obscure the hiring company.
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Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com

The easiest way to look for job postings is to go to a site like indeed.com:
Indeed.com allows users to search for a technology and see which companies are hiring for it. You can
also limit your search to job postings from a specific company. Is Oracle hiring a lot of new Solaris
developers? The following search string will let you know:
solaris company:oracle
If you what to know the senior positions theyre trying to fill, you can also filter by salary range. Limiting
the search to the top end of the range yields more strategic jobs.
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Page-Watching Tools
You can also use page-watching services or tools such as Google Reader, which recently gained the
ability to watch a page for changes even if it doesnt expose an RSS feed. If you point this tool at a
companys career page, you can quickly detect new positions by adding a subscription to the page as
though it were a blog, and Google will monitor it for changes:
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Glassdoor
Glassdoor (www.glassdoor.com) aggregates employee reviews, information gleaned from interview
candidates, and salary information from individuals who work at a given company. While user-submitted
information and the wisdom of crowds are not always accurate, this mechanism provides a wealth of
information that is valuable in conjunction with other sources. The following example of GlassDoor
information for VMware displays a range of salaries for members of VMwares technical staff, which
could be valuable in a variety of ways:
Any individual employee review should be taken with a grain of salt, but a series of reviews from a single
company can create a composite picture that helps to reveal company culture, particularly when
repeated themes such as the following emerge:
Ossified management
Fragmented and overlapping products that confuse customers
Failure to deliver new products on time
Lack of innovation
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The review shown below gives a good example of some of the depth youll find in sets of employee
reviews:
Glassdoor also provides detail on how interviewees regard the company. While in many cases, an
interviewees experience of the company is based on limited experience, recurring themes among many
such individuals about a single company can reveal otherwise-hidden information.
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Chapter 2: Web Site Analysis

There are many situations in which it is valuable to determine statistics about a Web site. You may want
to compare a competitors site traffic with your own, or you may want to identify key influencers in an
industry. There are a variety of free tools that can help you determine information such as the following:
How many visitors is the site getting?

What is the sites influence and reputation?
What news and influencers are linking back to the site?
Did a positive or negative review get any attention?
Xinu Returns
Xinu Returns (www.xinureturns.com) provides a wealth of statistics about a site by aggregating
information available through many other sources. Information includes:
How long the site has been active

Ranking information to gauge the sites traffic and influence
Number of links back to the site through social bookmarking (Digg, etc.)
Size of the site in terms of page count
Links to the site
The following screenshot shows the Xinu Returns information for www.linkedin.com:
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Note that most of the statistics are hyperlinks, which allows you to click on information that is of
interest to navigate to the source.
Compete.com Web site statistics

The free site www.compete.com can quickly provide information about how much traffic a competitors
Web site is receiving. Under the Site Profile tab, you can enter a Web address, and compete.com will
show the number of visitors that site is getting:
The site lets you configure date ranges from seven days up to two years, which is useful to determine
how your site compares with a competitors, or to determine how much traffic an influencer is receiving.
Compete.com also works for sites that get a relatively low amount of traffic, so its useful even if a site is
only getting 500 visits per day.
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Quantcast
Quantcast (www.quantcast.com) also provides Web site statistics. Although it provides meaningful
statistics only for sites with high levels of traffic, it also provides free demographic information about the
visitors:
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Network Solutions WhoIs

In cases where you want to contact a site owner but they havent provided any contact information on
their site, you can rely on the fact that people are required to provide contact information when they
register a domain. For example, we own the domain cascadeinsights.com. This domain registration
information is available through a public WhoIs service, accessible at
www.networksolutions.com/whois-search. A search for linkedin.com shows the following corporate
information:
For smaller sites, the WhoIs information often provides the site owners full name and email address.
One caveat to this approach is that domains are sometimes registered by intermediaries such as Web
hosting companies. In such a case, you WhoIs will reveal the hosting companys information, rather than
that of the site owner.
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PostRank
Measuring the impact of a specific blog post can be valuable in cases such as when a company makes a
major announcement through one if its blogs or when a product receives a very positive or negative
review. PostRank (www.postrank.com) can reveal such information. For example, the following are the
highest-ranked posts about the iPad on the endgadget technical enthusiast site:
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Yahoo! Site Explorer

Another way to know if a news item has had an impact is to see if many people have linked back to it.
The Yahoo! Site Explorer (https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites) lets you explore any URL and
see where its been linked to:
When you explore a URL, you can click the Inlinks in the results to see sites that have linked to the URL
that you entered. You also typically want to select Show Inlinks: Except from this domain to exclude
the instances where the site links to itself.
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Technorati
One more technique for determining the influence of a blog is with www.technorati.com, which enables
you to find the most authoritative posts on a particular topic or to look up a specific blog to determine
how it ranks. Lower ranking numbers are better:
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Wordle
Wordle (www.wordle.net), which displays visually what a particular site is saying in aggregate, is a very
fun tool to use. The following output is based on Ronald Reagans Tear Down This Wall speech. The
themes of the speech become instantly apparent:
Another example is Steve Jobs 2007 keynote announcement for the iPhone:
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Notice how laden the Wordle report is with motivation (go, got, get, now, just); desire (gonna, wanna,
like); and product identity (phone, iPod, music, email, iTunes, TV). By pointing this tool at a competitors
Web site, you can easily obtain a digest of their content, which provides clues about their key focus
areas, as well as giving you a unique sense of the organizations character. Pointing it at your own sites
can likewise be illuminating.
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Chapter 3: Industry, Topic, and Company Tracking

A wealth of resources are available for coming up to speed quickly about an industry or technology, or
tracking the chatter around a company or topic.
Twitter
Twitter (www.twitter.com) is obviously a phenomenon, and for better or worse, many people have
adopted the habit of publicizing what seems like their every move, including who they meet with, the
deals they close, the status of their products, and many other similar pieces of information.
While one tweet will not (usually) change the course of history, a series of tweets that are reviewed with
the Twitter users work history in mind can be very informative. Furthermore, from the standpoint of
relationship building, that information can provide a wealth of information about a persons interests,
background, and recent activities.
In this context, it is most valuable to be able to follow a set of users who all tweet on the same subject,
follow all of the individuals at a company who tweet, or see all of the tweets an organization has made
over time.
Searching Twitter
There is such a variety of ways to search Twitter in addition to the basic search found at
search.twitter.com that it could easily be the subject of an entire book. Even a basic introduction,
however, can help make you dramatically more productive in searching for individuals on Twitter.
Google Search
Google recently launched functionality that bears directly on how to effectively search the archive of
tweets:
Google also lets you navigate the stream of tweets by clicking the graphic at the top of the search
results, allowing you to step back in time. This functionality can be useful in order to see what the buzz
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was about a given topic that occurred weeks, months, or years in the past. Common searches related to
tweets include the following (among many others):
Company names
Initiative names
Industry nopics
Trends
Breaking news
Individuals
Twit(url)y
Twit(url)y (www.twitturly.com) is a very useful service for finding tweets that contain a particular Web
site address in them, either as text or as the source of a shorted URL using a service like Bit.ly. What
follows is an example for a search on the text citrix.com:
You can also perform searches on the word Citrix that would pull up every instance where Citrix was
used as part of a URL, such as www.informationweek.com/enteprise/interviews/citrix.
Using Twit(url)y, you can also quickly see how a given company is leveraging Twitter in terms of PR and
marketing campaigns. If you find a limited number of links back to their main corporate site from
Twitter, it is a clear indication that the company has not made a significant investment in social media,
since if they had, you would expect to see them pointing back to their own Web properties.
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TweetBeep
Another service that is similar to Google Alerts but focused on Twitter is TweetBeep
(www.tweetbeep.com), which will alert you via email anytime someone tweets on a particular term:
Hashtags
Another key Twitter concept that you should be familiar with is the hashtag, which is essentially a
method of grouping together related tweets. For example, if you search #innovation, youll find tweets
that roughly align with the topic of innovation, or if you search for #mgmt, #virtualization,
#cloudcomputing, #android, #socialmedia, #linkedin, or any one of number of other possibilities, youll
find tweets that roughly align with the hashtag youre searching on.
The reason the alignment is rough is that individual Twitter users decide which hashtags they associate
with a given tweet. That characteristic means that tweets about the iPhone may not show up under
#iphone if the user tweets on the subject without putting the #iphone hashtag in the 140 character
tweet. Conversely, some tweets may use a given hashtag even though they have a tenuous relationshiup
to that hashtag.
Despite the fact that the hashtag is an imperfect categorization method, it is also a very useful means of
finding a good density of tweets that align with the subject of interest. You can also feed these hashtags
into other Twitter search tools and desktop applications that will keep you updated if anyone tweets
using a particular hashtag. For example, you might want to keep track of a subject such as a technology
(e.g., #iphone), a company (e.g., #redhat), or an industry trend (e.g., #virtualization). Tracking a hashtag
over time gives you a window into the heartbeat around a topic on Twitter.
One final use of the hashtag that weve found valuable is to listen in on conference chatter. Many
technical and even non-technical conferences promote a specific hashtag for users to use when
tweeting about the event. Those tweets can direct you toward presentations that have been made
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publicly available, news announcements made at the conference, and general information about what
people found most interesting or thought-provoking at the conference.
It is also possible to search on keywords such as Microsoft Virtualization, or iphone 4.0, which will
return a list of all of the tweets that match the string of characters you entered.
Some examples of tools that support this type of searching (among others) include the following:
Hootsuite
Seismic Desktop
Tweet Deck
Twitter Directories
Beyond simply following specific users or topics, you can also find people who appear to be authorities
on certain topics.
WeFollow
Wefollow (www.wefollow.com) is one of the better directories for this type of Twitter searching. You
can quickly search for a topic, term, or company using the search tool and be presented with two
different lists:
The first tab highlights Twitter users that Wefollow ranks as highly influential on the topic. The second
tab is simply another view of the same data, sorting by Twitter users with the greatest numbers of
followers.
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Listorious
Listorious (www.listorious.com) is another solid Twitter directory, which provides you with lists of
Twitter users that have been submitted by other users:
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Quarkbase
Quarkbase (www.quarkbase.com) is a niche search engine that lets you determine the social impact of a
company, based on factors such as recent blog posts, popular pages, social tally, and overall size of the
company:
LinkedIn and Twitter

Twitter and LinkedIn now work together collaboratively so that a users tweet on Twitter can be
displayed as their LinkedIn status. Users can also re-tweet their LinkedIn status.
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Slideshare
When researching a topic, www.slideshare.net is one of the top resources available. Think of SlideShare
as a YouTube for PowerPoint presentations. Users can upload presentations on any topics they want,
and SlideShare has grown to the point where there is information available on just about everything:
From a competitive intelligence perspective, SlideShare can help you accomplish the following:
View competitors presentations on their products

See how they position their products against yours
See presentations by industry experts that show the full industry landscape
Get high-level overviews or deep technical details on topics
Get analysis and predictions for an industry
In many cases, the slides are available for download, allowing you to archive them and share details
offline. In some cases, the presentations even include audio, creating what SlideShare refers to as a
slidecast. Often, slides from conferences are also available on SlideShare, even in cases where attending
the event itself was by invitation only. Such presentations can provide in-depth competitive intelligence
that would otherwise be difficult to obtain.
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Google Alerts
Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) are a key way to monitor a topic or competitor, providing news
results by email for topics based on search terms you enter:
Google Alerts can send you results from news sites, blogs, the Web, video, groups, or all of these
combined. You can also specify how often you want to receive alerts, with options ranging from, as it
happens to once a week. Finally, you can control the maximum number of items that an alert
contains.
This type of monitoring is especially effective because the information is pushed to your inbox, rather
than requiring you to go out and retrieve it on a regular basis.
Change Detection
Monitoring a specific Web page for changes can be valuable in circumstances that range from
monitoring a political candidates position statements to monitoring a competitors case studies. With
change detection, youre notified when a page changes, and when you look at the results, a before and
after view of the changes is provided. One free site that provides this service is ChangeDetection.com:
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Silobreaker
Like many niche search engines, Silobreaker (www.silobreaker.com) can help accelerate your searching
if you use it wisely. One of Silobreakers key features is the Network map:
The Silobreaker network map provides a series of clickable topics that enable you to examine how topics
and people are connected. You can click a topic to make it the center, and explore the map accordingly.
You can also click on the small nodes (dots) between each key term in the network web, and Silobreaker
will pull up documents, Web sites, etc that tie the relationship between the two terms together. For
example, in the above example, clicking on the node between Microsoft and Oracle will retrieve
documents and stories that highlight what work the two companies are both doing in the Cloud
Computing space.
Silobreaker also does an exceedingly good job at pulling together quotes made by a company or
individual over a period of time. For example, the following report shows quotes by Jeff Bezos, the CEO
of Amazon:
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Yahoo! Site Explorer

Yahoo! Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) makes it trivially simple to see the inbound
links to a site (sites that link back to a particular site). Examples of uses for reviewing inbound links
include the following:
Providing insight into a companys partners and alliances. Many companies point back to the
Web sites of partners or companies whose solutions they leverage as a portion of their overall
product or solution.
Getting more direct access to product reviews and comparisons. It is common for product
reviews to include pointers back to the product page for the product under review. Therefore,
review of inbound links can quickly reveal reviews and commentary around products or service
offerings.
What follows is an example of the output from Yahoo! Site Explorer for a site associated with the
Ubuntu open source operating system project:
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Yahoo! Developer Query Language

For those with a significant amount of technical background, the Yahoo! Developer Query language site
at http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console provides a very powerful way to search the Web. For
example, the following query provides the top 10 inbound links from the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool for
the domain www.tripwire.com:
Mastery of this tool, which allows you to easily handcraft queries, could greatly accelerate your ability to
search for information about competitors.
Financial Information
While reviewing a companys financial history can take a great deal of time, the right tools can provide a
quick view of a companys financial health.
Google Finance / MSN Finance / Yahoo! Finance
All three of these sites (www.google.com/finance, http://msn.moneycentral.com, and
http://finance.yahoo.com) provide views of a companys recent performance, revenue, profit ratios, etc.
The choice between them is largely a matter of personal taste.
Seeking Alpha
Seeking Alpha (www.seekingalpha.com) provides full-text transcripts of earnings calls, which can be one
of the best ways to get information about publicly traded companies, as those companies are required
to report to investors on a quarterly basis.
Form 990 and Not for Profit Companies
Not-for-profit companies require a slightly different approach to analysis than other types of
organizations, because they follow different reporting requirements. Still, those reporting requirements
provide for a wealth of interesting data to be available.
The first place to look when considering a not-for-profit company is their annual Form 990 filing, which
will reveal information such as the following:
Gross income
Income from membership dues versus other income sources
Expense information such as travel, marketing, equipment rental, etc.
Compensation for the Director of the organization
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For example, a review of the Form 990 for the American Marketing Association shows that the
organization made $3.1 million from membership dues, but $12.3 million from program service revenue.
We can also see records of compensation in 2008:
The Executive Director earned $345,000 for the year

The Chief Financial officer earned $118,000 for the year
The Director of Publishing earned $137,000 for the year
The Chief Marketing Director earned $128,000 for the year
The Director of Information Technology earned $102,000 for the year
The Director of Human Resources earned $85,000 for the year
The highest-paid independent contractors for Professional Services were as follows:
Manifest Digital (Chicago, IL): $1,045,000

Contrast Design Group (Chicago, IL): $524,000.00
TMA Resources (Vienna, VA): $422,252
The highest paid contractors for other services were as follows:
Brown Printing: $518,000.00

Edwards Brothers: $264,000
Arredia Printing: $184,000
Beyond the information above, a single Form 990 filling can reveal a host of other facts, such as that out
of a total operating revenue of around $17 million, the AMA spent $65,000 on awards, $377,000 on
special projects, and $504,000 on Web technology.
There are also a number of sites devoted to analyzing not-for-profit organizations. For example, the
National Center for Charitable Statistics (http://nccs.urban.org) is a national clearinghouse for such data.
Guidestar.org is a subscription based service that provides different levels of access to Form 990 data,
based on free or paid subscriptions.
Pirate Radio Communities

Another important research factor to consider is that some of the best information appears only in what
we refer to as pirate radio communities, which are typically set up by individuals who have a
passionate interest in a topic. They can also be set up by corporations themselves when they want to
create a community outside of their official corporate sites.
While these sites are generally indexed by Google and other search engines, it is often more successful
to spend time directly on the sites, reviewing content in forums, blogs, and other resources there.
A good example of the types of information you can find using this approach comes from Howard
Forums, a well-known community site focused on the telecommunications industry. For example, the
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following forum thread contains disclosures of various companies corporate wireless discount with
Verizon wireless:
http://www.howardforums.com/
showthread.php?t=1139413&page=1&pp=15&highlight=corporate+discount
Over time, approximately 100 to 200 company discounts have been communicated, by companies that
include Wells Fargo, Emory University, Xerox and many other household names.
A company-sponsored example of this type of site is the Channel 9 site (channel9.msdn.com), which is
supported by Microsoft. The Channel 9 site contains a wealth of information about what Microsofts
developer community thinks, both positively and negatively, about Microsofts current developer
technologies. It also contains interviews with product managers about future product releases, details
on current products, etc.
Additional examples of sites like these include the following:
www.opensource.com is sponsored by Red Hat, a well-known vendor of open source solutions.

Channel 10 (on10.net) and TechNet Edge (edge.technet.com) are community sites sponsored by
Microsoft that contain a wealth of current and historical dialogue among developers, IT
professionals, and Microsoft.
Ning
Ning sites (www.ning.com) are a valuable resource for background information on many topics, as
well as to find individuals to interview about those topics. Until recently, Ning sites were free to set up
and operate, which has led to a large number of Ning sites being created over the past few years.
The following is a small sample of interesting Ning sites:
Oracle Community (www.oraclecommunity.net), with 7,000 + members

Business of Software (network.businessofsoftware.org), with 1,162 members
SocialMedia.com, with 3,733 members
WiMax 360 (wimaxcommunity.ning.com), with 8,478 members
Archive.org (Also Known As The Wayback Machine)

Archive.org, or the Internet Wayback Machine, allows you to view the past history of a companys Web
presence. The service provides access to snapshots of Web sites that have been taken over time, and in
many cases, the snapshot history for a given site may go back a decade or more.
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For example, the following screenshot shows the Apple home page circa 1997:
You can gain valuable business intelligence from archive.org. For example, when a competitor acquires a
company, the acquired companys site is often taken down, and researchers may want to gather
information about it. After all, the smaller company will, in most cases, continue to sell the same
products, technologies, and solutions as before the acquisition.
In this case, archive.org can be of substantial value, by enabling you simply to navigate back in time to
view previous versions of company pages. In many cases, you can also navigate through the site as if it
were still live on the Web, as archive.org caches pages from the site several layers deep.
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Archive.org is also useful beyond acquisition scenarios. When profiling a competitor, you often want to
know how their product, service, or positioning has evolved over time. With archive.org, you can look
back through time at the site and see when specific products or services were brought to market, and
how they have changed over time:
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Chapter 4: Information on Countries, Populations, etc.

The standard research task of gathering background information about a country or region can play a
significant role in competitive intelligence. This might be the case, for example, when a competitor
opens an office in that country. Key tools for this research include the CIA World Fact Book and
Nationmaster.
CIA World Fact Book

The CIA World Fact Book, available at www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook, provides
information on the history, geography, economy, communications, military, and transnational issues for
all countries in the world. An immense amount of free data is available. The following is an example
excerpt from the entry for Poland:
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NationMaster
NationMaster (www.nationmaster.com) is a site similar to the CIA world fact book that allows you to
quickly compare nations across a wide range of statistical categories. For example, a quick query on
Electrical power consumption provides the following data:
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Chapter 5: Map Data

Google Maps
While many people are familiar with Google Maps (http://maps.google.com), most dont think of it as a
competitive intelligence tool. But looking at a satellite view or street view lets you quickly see the
physical characteristics of a companys office location. This capability is becoming increasingly important
as many companys present themselves on the Web in a way that may not be a true representation of
their size or capabilities.
For example, a small consulting firm may present themselves as having a worldwide presence, whereas
investigation may easily reveal that the sole corporate office is in someones home. While many
companies grow to a substantial size with a virtual workforce, it is uncommon for a mid-size or larger
company not to have true office space.
Using Street Maps or Satellite View can also give you insight into the size of a companys operations in a
given location. For example, a large manufacturing plant with an extensive parking lot surrounding it
suggests a very different company footprint in a given geographic location than a nondescript office park
with limited parking space around it.
In addition to the functionality that is included in Google Maps, you can also leverage one of the
numerous mashups that have been created using Google Maps as a base. One site that tracks some of
the mashups that have been created over time is Google Maps Mania, at
googlemapsmania.blogspot.com.
This mashup created on the service Wayfaring leverages Google Maps as the core map plumbing and
plots San Francisco Area Tech Companies on a map (seewww.wayfaring.com/maps/show/4358):
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The mashup at www.socaltech.com/intelligence/map provides visibility into the geographic distribution

of recent venture funding in Southern California:
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Bing Maps
While a late comer to the mapping market, Bing Maps (www.bing.com/maps) has its own set of
associated mashups that have been built on top of the service. For example, the Newseum mashup lets
you quickly see the front pages of papers from around the world (see
www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/flash/bing.asp):
Bing and Google Maps

There is also an interesting site that blends the Birds Eye view from Bing Maps with Google Street
View to give you multiple perspectives on the same location (see
www.mashedworld.com/DualMaps.aspx).
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For example, the following is an example of the rendered output for a location in Portland, Oregon.
Street View is in the upper left and Bings Birds Eye view is on the right:
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ERSI
ESRI has various levels of access that range from guest access, which provides a certain number of free
reports, up to premium access that costs $2,500 a year. One of the advantages that ESRI provides is the
ability to easily slice data. The example below shows a custom polygon that was drawn to constrain any
resulting reports to data that only comes from the defined area:
You can then add various reports, free or otherwise, to the reports tab and have ESRI run the reports for
you:
In the example above, the Executive Summary would return a large data set that includes the number of
households, average income, owner-occupied versus renter-occupied dwellings, media home values,
and so on, using only the data associated with the area inside the polygon drawn on the map. This ability
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to define abstract regions within cities, states, or countries and pull statistics that map to user-drawn
polygons is a key strength of the ESRI site.
Another example of the use of ESRI data is for market opportunity analysis. With ESRIs Research Market
reports, you can produce information such as the following for a user-defined geographic area:
Business Summary (total number of businesses, total sales, total employees

Construction Employees
Number of restaurants in a given region
Number of service-based businesses in the region
The example below is based on total sales for businesses within the region:
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Chapter 6: Federal, State, and Local Data

In some cases, the object of your search resides in a Federal, State, or Local database. In these cases, the
wealth of publicly disclosed information can nevertheless be difficult to retrieve.
FedStats.gov
Fedstats.gov provides various statistics from federal agencies. Just a few of the tools on this site include
MapStats, Stats aligned by Topic, and the Statistical Abstract of the United States.
MapStats
The MapStats section of FedStats makes it easy to gather statistical information about a US state. For
example, the following is a subset of the data available about Oregon from the site:
You can also drill down into data focused on a city or county.
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Census
The Census Bureau provides a wide array of statistics culled from recent census data. One example is the
United States Statistical Abstract, which provides details on housing, construction, employment, income,
energy, transportation, and other topics. The brief pictured below is available at
www.census.gov/compendia/statab/brief.html:
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You also use the Fact Finder portion of the US Census site (factfinder.census.gov), to quickly find
information about a particular city. The example below is related to Oregon City, Oregon:
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Campaign Contributions
It is simple to very quickly identify who has given campaign contributions to a given political candidate.
There are a few different sites that can help in this regard, but a key one is the Federal Election
Commissions Disclosure Data Search (fec.gov/finance/disclosure/disclosure_data_search.shtml). The
example below shows a subset of the campaign contributions made to a particular congressman:
Knowing that a key individual in a company has made contributions to a particular candidate provides
insight into their politics and ideology, which can be important to a sales team or people planning
account strategy.
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Chapter 7: People Searching

People searching is an interesting challenge. On the one hand, there are sites that do it very well, like
LinkedIn, if you are looking for an individual profile or a set of profiles. On the other hand, if you are
looking for a broader view of a persons entire activity on the Web, the tools available vary
tremendously in terms of their overall quality.
Unfortunately, a lot depends on the uniqueness of the individuals name. For example, searches on one
author of this book, Scott Swigart, will retrieve well-targeted results more quickly than searches on the
more common name, Sean Campbell. The resources described here are worthy of putting into your
bookmark list.
NNDB
NNDB.com can provide a set of detailed information on an individual. For example in the following
screenshot we can see information on the personal history of Larry Ellison (Oracle CEO), his membership
in various organizations, etc.:
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Muckety Map
Muckety Map (www.muckety.com) is another good example of a search tool that provides a 360 degree
view of an individual. The example below is also for Larry Ellison:
Social Mention
It is also advisable to track the social media footprint of individuals whom you are researching. For
example, the site Social Mention (www.socialmention.com) can provide a solid view of a personals
individual contributions to the social Web.
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Chapter 8: MetaSearch Engines

Metasearch engines let you search multiple search engines at a time. Because of the large number of
such engines, we profile only a few here.
Dogpile
Dogpile (www.dogpile.com) pulls together the most relevant searches from Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and
Ask:
Clusty
Clusty (www.clusty.com) uses a different method for ranking search results than a typical search engine
such as Google search. Clusty queries multiple different search engines and then combines the results in
clusters. The example below shows how Clusty clumps together search results in the left hand pane, for
a different method of navigating search results from multiple different search providers:
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Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com) debuted to much initial fanfare. Since then, while any illusions
that it was going to be a Google killer have faded, Wolfram Alpha does have some interesting assets to
bring to bear when you are searching for information.
One example that highlights the approach that Wolfram Alpha takes with search is to do a search on the
International Space Station (ISS). A search focused on the term ISS returns the following:
Obviously, most search engines dont display the current speed or altitude of the object you are
searching on. Thinking of Wolfram Alpha as a scientific calculator on steroids for the Web may be more
on the right track than simply regarding it as just another search engine. As a result, Wolfram Alpha is
better suited to understanding certain types of input (such as equations) than others. When it
understands the query, it can quickly aggregate a wide range of data that would take you a long time to
find otherwise.
An illustrative example is the query, united states population / spain population, which calculates the
US population divided by Spains population, returning the value 7.01. Similarly, consider the following
possibilities:
GDP per capita Norway / Sweden

Cost of Living, New York
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Doctor Salary New York / Doctor Salary Portland

France Population 2010 / France population 1990
The query Apple vs. Microsoft returns the latest trading price, market cap, employee count, various
financial statistics, price history and a number of other details. Following is a subset of the data:
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Chapter 9: Google Tips

Despite the fact that the title of this little book suggests the use of tools other than Google, there are so
many powerful Google tools available that a chapter dedicated to them is an obvious requirement. The
following ways to utilize Google all fall into the power tips category.
Search Box Tips

When typing text in the Google Search box, most users simply type in their query, sometimes
surrounding it with quotes such as in the example toy box, and leave it at that. There are a number of
a different attributes you can easily add to your query to make it more powerful and get more quickly at
the data you are looking for.
Site:
The site: attribute constrains Googles search to just the Web site you place after the colon, as in the
following example:
operating system site:www.microsoft.com/*
An important point to notice is the inclusion of the /* after the site name. This informs Google that you
want search results from any page on the site, not just the home page of the site. You can also include
multiple sites as follows:
operating system site:www.microsoft.com/* site:www.redhat.com/*.
Filetype:
The filetype: attribute is one of the most powerful and least utilized Google Search modifiers. Before
you add it to a query, however, you must consider what type of document is most likely to contain the
information you are searching for. For example, is it most likely that it would be found in a spreadsheet?
If so, use filetype:xls or filetype:xlsx. Likewise, if it is most likely to be found in a PowerPoint
presentation, utilize filetype:ppt or filetype:pptx, and if it is most likely to be found in an Adobe
Acrobat file, use filetype:pdf..
These attributes will constrain the Google search to return only documents of the given file type. For
example, the following search will return Adobe Acrobat documents that contain the phrase operating
system:
operating system filetype:pdf
You can also combine the filetype: search attribute with the site: search attribute to get a more
targeted set of search results, as in the following example:
windows 7 site:www.microsoft.com/* filetype:pdf
In the example above, the search results would include PDF documents that contain the phrase
windows 7 from the microsoft.com site.
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InURL:
The inurl: attribute is used when you want to specify that you are looking for a site that has a specific
word or phrase in the URL. It is important to understand that this search attribute focuses not just on
words in the site domain (e.g., Microsoft.com) but on the entire URL that Google might have indexed.
For example, the URL www.microsoft.com/casestudies has the word casestudies in it, even though
that word is not in the domain name itself.
With that background in mind, there are two key ways to use the inurl: attribute. The first is in
conjunction with the site: attribute. The following query will return Web pages that contain the text
windows 7 on the Microsoft site where the URL contains the keyword partner:
windows 7 site:www.microsoft.com/* inurl:partner
Here is an example of the search results from that query:
The inurl: attribute is important because it allows you to look for a portion of a Web site for which you
dont already know the full path. Once you find a partner-specific site, you can constrain your results to
just that one URL and the pages on and underneath it. For example, building from the fifth link above,
http://www.microsoft.com/canada/partner, we could now construct the following query:
windows 7 site: http://www.microsoft.com/canada/partner/* filetype:pdf
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That query returns the following search result:
This result is quite different from the prior one, since it is constrained to Windows 7 discussions that
target Microsofts Canadian partners.
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A second use of the inurl: attribute is in cases when you are unsure whether a site exists that focuses
on a subject area you are interested in. While it is possible to address this issue through generic queries
(for example, by simply typing windows 7 in the search box), you can often drill down more effectively
by inputting the keyword query after an inurl: attribute. For example, the following query will return
Web sites that have windows7 in the URL:
inurl:windows7
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A good example of a case where this approach may be valuable is if you were looking for sites that focus
on a particular industry term, such as solar power:
Show Options
A very powerful set of tools hides just out of view when you are looking at a set of search results from
Google. You can find these tools by clicking More Search Tools to the left of your search results:
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WonderWheel
Beyond having a cute name, the WonderWheel can be very useful. The following example shows the
results returned by the WonderWheel search on the search phrase solar power:
WonderWheel results are graphical and highly navigable. Clicking Solar Powered Cars in the
WonderWheel above returns the following output:
Note that the search results in the right-hand pane have adjusted to the focus on Solar Powered Cars.
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Timeline
The Timeline view, accessible right underneath the Wonder Wheel link, provides the following view of
the same query on solar powered cars:
The timeline view is obviously a chronological view of the search results, but what may be less obvious is
that that you can drill down into the timeline view. For example, clicking on 2000 returns the following
view:
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Clicking on 2010 returns the following view:
The timeline view can be incredibly valuable if you want to see what transpired around the time of a
specific event such as a press release, a technology release, a product release, or an industry shakeup.
You can also constrain your searches to a particular time period more directly through the tools found
just above the Wonder Wheel and the Timeline View. These tools are shown in the following screenshot
under the Any Time heading:
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A final option to consider is the Updates option, which becomes visible when you expand the topmost search options on the left-hand side of the Google search results page:
Clicking Updates shows you recent Twitter traffic on a topic, as in the following screenshot:
Google Custom Search

Google Custom Search allows you to create your own search engine that targets just specific sites of
interest. One use for such a tool is to set up a custom search engine that targets the sites of your
competitors. Using a custom search engine is easier than repeatedly formatting a query in Googles
Search box with multiple site: modifiers if you regularly look across a number of different current and
potential competitor sites.
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To get started, visit www.google.com/cse and click Create a Custom Search Engine. The site will
prompt you for the sites you want the search engine to surface results from:
After completing a simple series of steps, youll be directed to a custom search engine page that only
returns results from the Web sites youve entered. Remember to enter Web addresses in the following
format to retrieve all of the pages from a site and not just the site home page:
www.redhat.com/*
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Newstimeline
Googles news timeline tool (newstimeline.googlelabs.com) can be a great way to visualize the flow of a
series of quotes by an executive over time, how an issue has been perceived over time, and other similar
types of searches. An example of a search on Larry Ellison using the tool is shown below:
Notice that each one of the search results focuses on a comment made by Larry Ellison, along with a
clear pointer to the source article.
FastFlip
Googles Fast Flip (fastflip.googlelabs.com) allows you to quickly see the front pages of various Web sites
in a flash-card style format. Fast Flip makes it easy to see whether a given story has made the front
page on various Web sites and how those sites are reporting on the story at a high level:
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After you flip through a few sites, you can zoom in on a given site and continue flipping in the secondary
view that the tool provides:
Google Insights for Search

Googles Insights for Search (www.google.com/insights/search/#) lets you mine information by simply
looking at popular searches on Google. Given Googles large user base, statistics taken from this tool can
point to larger trends.
For example, the search term solar power generates the following regional interest results using the
default setting of Web Search, but with the results constrained to the past 12 months of data:
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You can also pivot the same results based on a city-focused view:
When you or a competitor have recently launched a new product, this tool can give you a sense of how
much the product is on buyers minds in specific countries. The following search shows interest in the
search term ipad during a seven-day window starting on April 30th, 2010 and ending on May 6th, 2010:
Google Insights also lets you see the rate of change over time by simply clicking the View Change over
Time link in the results above, which returns the following view:
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Playing the results over time using the tool would reveal an increase in iPad search activity in the United
States toward the end of the month of April, 2010, which indeed coincides with the launch of the 3Genabled version of the iPad by Apple that month.
Google Reader
We couldnt conclude a section on Google without mentioning Google Reader, which can be one of the
most powerful tools available to keep track of Web sites RSS feeds. Google Reader makes it easy to tag,
sort, and filter RSS feeds over time.
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Conclusion
This book has introduced you to a variety of tools and techniques that you can use to extract far more
information from the Web. Gathering information is a critical first step, as this information is the basis
for synthesis, analysis, and the presentation and communication of insights. We strongly recommend
that you invest time in these skills as well.
This book also has focused on what are called secondary or open source sources of information.
While you can glean significant information from these sources, you must not forget the importance of
primary or human intelligence sources. In short, there are things to be learned by picking up the
phone and talking to someone that youd never find in writing somewhere, so dont forget to reach out
to other people (e.g., field sales, customers) in order to round out your understanding of issues.
Finally, this book has provided you with a sizable collection of current resources but were constantly
discovering new tools and techniques. To stay up-to-date on the latest developments, we recommend
that you sign up for our newsletter at www.cascadeinsights.com/newsletter.
Page 81

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First Printing: June 2010

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

About Cascade Insights

Software or hardware product/industry knowledge

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Chapter 1: Organizations and People............................................................................................. 8

Chapter 2: Web Site Analysis........................................................................................................... 26

Chapter 3: Industry, Topic, and Company Tracking ............................................................... 35

Chapter 4: Information on Countries, Populations, etc. ........................................................ 50

Chapter 5: Map Data ........................................................................................................................... 52

Chapter 6: Federal, State, and Local Data ................................................................................... 58

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Chapter 7: People Searching ........................................................................................................... 62

Chapter 8: MetaSearch Engines ...................................................................................................... 64

Chapter 9: Google Tips ...................................................................................................................... 67

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Information on competitors. Current and future strategy, tactics, products, acquisitions,

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Competitive Intelligence and Search Skills

Why This Book is Needed Right Now

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Chapter 1: Organizations and People

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

LinkedIn Company Pages

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Other companies that employees typically come from and go to

What follows is an example profile for Citrix Systems:

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Past work history

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

LinkedIn Search Tips

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Fname: first name

"median age, * 40..45 years" site:linkedin.com/companies/*

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

"* after: * VMware" site:linkedin.com/companies/*

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Current and future product development areas

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Chapter 2: Web Site Analysis

How many visitors is the site getting?

How long the site has been active

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Compete.com Web site statistics

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Network Solutions WhoIs

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google

Cascade Insights: Go Beyond Google