Companies on the Web

Finding companies, products and materials information can be a difficult task, but the web has made this job much easier. This is a short tutorial on how I might find this information using the web.

You know the company name

1. A highly successful method, for finding a company's web site is to incorporate the name of the company within the address: www.somecompany.com. The address is not case-sensitive.
2. A more traditional approach to locate companies in the United States is the Thomas Register. It is available free of charge on the Web at http://www.thomasregister.com, but requires a user to register before access to the site is permitted. Products as well as company names can be searched for. The site shows a participating companies web links, if available, and other pertinent data as in mailing addresses, phone numbers etc.
3. For scientific instrumentation and materials the Physics Today Buyer's Guide, has always been a useful resource and is now online. The online version, however, does not appear to be as complete as the paper version.
4. Web Search Engines
   • AltaVista
   • InfoSeek
   • Excite
   • Use your browser's default search resources.
   Once the search has returned, sometimes with thousands of documents, you need to sift through the results until you actually locate the company. You can refine your search within the results or just start paging. The results give a brief description (a few lines from the actual web site) which may be useful as well as the address of the web page. If your lucky, a description of a site will tell you that this is the company you were seeking and you can hop over to the site. Otherwise, look for a description which might profile the company - stock value, employees etc. try following these links, because financial/status reports such as these possibly include the link to the company's home page.
5. As another resource, one might also try the company links on the search engines homepage, but these usually give null results for non-support companies of the site. Very low usefulness.

What to do if they don't have a web site

If you really need to get at this company try the Yellow Pages, on the web of course. Again, there are different sites which could produce a unique response or have a higher order search capacity such as product type, but in general, these search engines are more uniform. This is due to the availability of phone numbers and addresses from the providers themselves. The names and numbers are then consolidated by others and are available as CD's. Find these at any of the search engine sites.

Beyond this, try the phone 800-555-1212 it still works :)