Online Data Services Online subscription services available in many university libraries provide access to a wide array of business reference material. For example, both the Web-based Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe and its dial-up service contain full-text 10-Ks, 10-Qs, annual reports, company profiles for more than 11,000 U.S. and international companies, and a variety of other valuable data files. Other subscription online data services include Bloomberg Financial News Services, Standard & Poor's Netadvantage, UMI Proquest, and Dun & Bradstreet's Companies Online. Very likely, your library subscribes to one or more of these services, thus making them available for you to use as needed.

Lexis-Nexis and other online services provide you with up-to-date company information by updating their databases every 24 hours or less. You may wish to search the Lexis-Nexis COMPANY library files listed below for the latest company news and financial data if you have access to the dial-up service. The company information included in these Lexis-Nexis files is also available through the Web-based Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, but the Web-based product does not require that you specify library names or file names.

Some of these Internet sources require subscriptions in order to access their entire databases.

Using a Search Engine Alternatively, or in addition, you can quickly locate and retrieve information on companies, industries, products, individuals, or other subjects of interest using such Internet search engines as Lycos, Alta Vista, Infoseek, Excite, Yahoo!, and Magellan. Search engines find articles and other information sources that relate to a particular industry, company name, topic, phrase, or "keyword" of interest. Some search engines contain bigger data bases of submitted Uniform Resource Locator addresses than others, so it is essential be alert to the coverage of each search engine—the data base covered by each search engine is usually described on the search engine’s Web site. You may find the following brief descriptions of the most-used search engines helpful in selecting which one to try:

• Alta Vista (www.altavista.com/)—Alta Vista searches the full text of all documents in its index of over 140 million submitted Web pages and also crawls the Web looking for links to new pages that match your search criteria. The search results give a higher score to documents where the keywords are in the first few words of the document or title; higher scores are also given to documents containing multiple use of the keywords. For the latest information on what you can find using the Alta Vista search engine, visit the Web site.

Each of the search engines provide guidelines for how to formulate your query for information sources; some tips for making the quickest and most effective use of search engines are listed below:

• Make your search as specific as possible. Search engines are very efficient and may retrieve thousands of matches to a very general request.
• Use Boolean operators like AND, AND NOT, OR, and parentheses to narrow the scope of your search. These operators help zero in on those items of greatest relevance to what you are looking for.
• Each search engine will have specific commands that will further limit the search results. Make sure that you inspect the search engine’s advanced search tips to determine how to use those capabilities.
• Some search engines are upper- and lower-case sensitive. As a rule, your query should be entered with the correct upper-case and lower-case letters because of the capitalization-sensitive nature of certain search engines.

Keep in mind that the information retrieved by a search engine is "unfiltered" and may include sources that are not reliable or that contain inaccurate or misleading information. Be wary of information provided by authors who are unaffiliated with reputable organizations or publications or which doesn’t come from the company or a credible trade association. Articles covering a company or issue should be copyrighted or published by a reputable source. If you are turning in a paper containing information gathered from the Internet, you should cite your sources (providing the Internet address and date visited); it is also wise to print web pages for your research file (some web pages are updated frequently).

The Learning Curve Is Steep With a modest investment of time, you will learn how to use Internet sources to run down information on companies and industries quickly and efficiently. And it is a skill that will serve you well into the future. Once you become familiar with the data available at the different Web sites mentioned above and with using a search engine, you will know where to go to look for the particular information that you want. Search engines nearly always turn up too many information sources that match your request rather than too few; the trick is to learn to zero in on those most relevant to what you are looking for. Like most things, once you get a little experience under your belt on how to do company and industry research on the Internet, you will find that you can readily find the information you need.