A lot of competitive intelligence “experts” deride the web. There was even an article in the May/June 2007 issue of SCIP’s Competitive Intelligence magazine that belittled the importance of the web for CI.

The problem is that most CI people do not really know how to search for CI on the web. They think they do - and view themselves as experts, using only Google to search. These tips and many more show that there is a lot more to it. (Just as another example, get to know http://www.domaintools.com - and their reverse IP look-up technique, to find out who else is using the same server. For example, who would think that http://www.0808.info had anything to do with Google. But it does - try it and see! You can find this link and more just by doing a reverse IP look-up).

At least some people are learning though - our day course on searching the Internet at the SCIP 2008 annual conference featured these tips and many more, so perhaps soon people will realise the value of the web for searching.

So well done and some good suggestions.

Arthur Weiss
AWARE
Competitive Intelligence for Business Success
http://www.marketing-intelligence.co.uk