Legal Resources - Click here to see a complete listing of the various lawyers' resources on the web, including law directories, case law, statutes and regulations, lawyers' organizations, a variety of online publications, law school links, and other web sites of interest to attorneys.
Tax Links - Starting with the main IRS page, there's a massive amount of tax-related information available online. You'll find listings of tax resources, including the Internal Revenue Code in hypertext, commentary, analysis, guides, tax directories, accountants' pages, international tax links, and many other relevant sources of tax information of all kinds.
Business, Finance, Trade - Corporate filings online, financial information, business directories, stock market and investment-related links, commerce and trade-promotion pages, etc.
Corporations - In addition to corporate SEC filings online, you'll find a number of web sites that help you find corporations and do research on them, through publicly-available information such as news items,
press releases, trade associations they belong to, etc.
Forums, Newsgroups - Archives, addresses, of "virtual communities," i.e., mailing lists, bulletin boards, legal and tax discussions of all kinds.
Search Engines & Finding Tools - A handy list, from Alta Vista to Yahoo, with Yellow and White Pages thrown in.
Reference; Practice Aids - Dictionaries and glossaries, law dictionaries, currency exchange rates, amortization tables, Fed Ex Tracking, Yellow Pages, Zip Code look-up, language translators, etc.
Miscellaneous - Travel sites, maps,
hotel guides, Kelly Blue Book, anything and everything else.
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Forums, Discussion Groups, Mailing Lists
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Search Engines & Finding Tools
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POPULAR SEARCH ENGINES:
· Alta Vista - Searches the largest number of pages of any search engine; case sensitive; allows wild cards (*), "+" for required search terms, "-" to exclude words from result.
· Yahoo - Combination of keyword
search engine and subject tree. Permits you to narrow the scope of your search by selecting subject area first; good when you don't have a particular page in mind; not exhaustive; best for major web pages.
· Lycos - Allows Boolean searching (AND, NOT, OR, etc.); "+" and "-" for required and excluded terms; phrases in quotes; not the highest level of accuracy, but getting better.
· Northern Light- Best for articles, scientific and scholarly topics; "+" and "-" for required and excluded terms; good accuracy.
· HotBot - Considered the best all-round search tool; allows you to choose the form of your search - Boolean queries, phrases, what to search (e.g., titles), etc.
· Excite - Allows concept searching (i.e., automatically uses synonyms); Boolean searching, field searching.
· Infoseek - Access either the full text or only the links, sites, URLs, or titles of 30 to 50 million Web pages. Gives the most current results; understands phrases in quotes, "+" and "-" for required and excluded terms; fair accuracy. Reads data within frames.
· GoTo - Fast, simple, clean user interface. Uses yet another method of ranking: actually sells position to commercial advertisers, then integrates those sites with all (non-paying) others. Nevertheless, can yield good results.
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COMBINED ENGINES: - There are certain web search services called, "Meta- tools" or "Multi-search Engines." They do not do the searching themselves, but link to a particular set of other search tools which do the actual work. Obviously, you can save time this way, though the results can be a bit overwhelming. Each of these multi- search services has its own peculiar interface; it's just a matter of finding one that gives you the flexibility you like without also adding a bunch of bells and whistles you find annoying.
One valuable lesson of these combination tools is that you can see how results may vary among the actual search engines. The identical query can yield 5 results from Goto, 150 from Excite, and none from Lycos!
· Mamma - Combines the top search engines, along with its own "smart" syntax and other tricks to give a surprisingly intelligent result.
· Debriefing - Nice, slick interface; this combo relies on AltaVista, Yahoo, Infoseek, Excite, Webcrawler, Lycos, and Hotbot. It forwards your query in parallel to those search services, collates the results, ranks them, and removes duplicates. Whew.
· Go2Net - Combines the Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Thunderstone and Yahoo search services, and does it fast! (Try Go2Net's "MiniCrawler," which opens a tiny search window that's surprisingly handy.
· Metacrawler - The ultimate in options: allows you to choose any/all of the 9 top search engines, to search by keyword, phrase or whatever, how long to wait for results, and a number of other confusing "customizing" features.
· ProFusion - The best, and fastest, of all the multiple search engines. You can choose any or all of the major searches (based on quality or speed), and also select how you want the results displayed. Works great.
· Dogpile - This combo consists of Yahoo, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Excite, and AltaVista, along with the smaller offbeat PlanetSearch, GoTo.com, Thunderstone, What U Seek and Magellan.
· Metafind - This extremely simple combination search tool encompasses Altavista, Excite, Infoseek, PlanetSearch and Webcrawler.
· SavvySearch - A good collection here: Lycos, Excite, HotBot, WebCrawler, Infoseek and AltaVista, as well as the lesser- knownThunderstone, NationalDirectory, Google, Galaxy, and Direct Hit.
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PEOPLE-FINDING TOOLS:
Most of the people-searching tools are based on phone books - but not entirely. Just because a number is unlisted doesn't mean they can't find that person: they have other methods as well. Your success in locating a particular individual will vary, depending mainly on how unique their name is, and also on how much other information you have, such as an address or at least the city they live in.
The regular search engines (Yahoo, Excite, etc.) all have "people finder" links that lead to the people-
finding services they've teamed up with. Some of the other links on the right are combination searches, and many offer special features, such as reverse look-up.
· AnyWho - Searches not only for individuals, but businesses, web sites, toll-free numbers, and has a reverse look-up. You might get lucky and find what you need here. If not, don't stop . . .
· Bigfoot Directory - Says it has
over 100 million listings; includes email, white pages, yellow pages, and an "advanced" (user-friendly) search feature.
· InfoSpace - (112 million listings) They get their information from phone books and other public records. Data in the email directory comes from various Internet service providers and from user submissions. A good feature is that once you find an individual, you can jump directly to a very flexible map displaying the location of the subject’s address, as well as all surrounding streets.
· Switchboard - (93 million listings) This is one of the fastest phone directories on the Web.
Switchboard offers an "advanced" search features that enables you to select from several dozen affiliations, so you can search within a group or organization. Also has business listings, email, etc.
· U.S. West - (70 million listings)
Seems quite efficient, if the name you're looking for isn't too common, and if you have a pretty good idea of the town they live in.
· Database America - This is another site with a criss-cross feature. If you type in a phone number, you will get back a name and address. Simple interface; commerce-oriented.
· WhoWhere - Like Database
America, WhoWhere provides a reverse phone number search. This site also enables searching on personal characteristics (choose the "Communities" advanced search option), including school, occupation, religion, favorite music, etc.
· People Search - A multiple
directory that searches four sets of white pages at once.
· Search.com - This is the CNet page; select "People Search A-Z List," and you'll get a listing of all the online directories you see here, and more.
· Trackem - An odd combination of people-finding links, mainly U.K., but also a few really offbeat ones.
· Death Database (Soc. Sec.) - Self-explanatory.
· Ultimate White Pages - Enables searching several phone books (one at a time) from one page.
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BUSINESS LISTINGS: Businesses are even easier to find on the Web than people. The bigger the company, the more you can find out about it, and the easier it is.
Yellow Pages:
· Bigbook, affiliated with GTE Superpages This service gives pretty good coverage of the entire U.S. Once your target is identified, you can click on it and get a map.
· BigYellow - Here's another national yellow page directory; if one of these first two books doesn't generate anything, try the other.
· Company Fax Lookup -
This fax directory sounds good - the only problem is that it only contains listings for businesses that have registered with it.
· Wall St. Journal Business Locator - this special page in InfoSpace, which includes white and yellow pages, international, government, etc., can be a
handy all-purpose starting point for a broad-ranging search.
Researching Corporations:
· SEC: Edgar - Your first stop in researching publicly- traded corporations might be Edgar, the corporate filings website of the Securities and Exchange Commission; this page is the corporate information database.
· Corporate Financials OnLine -
There are quite a few sites that offer publicly- available information about corporations, such as those in certain industries.
· Annual Report Gallery - An
easy-to-use interface for finding out about publicly traded companies.
· Hoover's OnLine - Hoover's
bills itself as the "ultimate" source for company information. It's also good for finding articles
on business, and offers an excellent free newsletter.
· Investorama: Publicly Traded Corporations Online - An easy-to-use interface for finding the web sites of public corporations.
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Researching Corporations - This is a kind of educational page; it offers to help
us "find out more than [we] probably ever wanted to know about transnational corporations!"
· Guide to Company Information - Another
beginner's guide, that takes you through the process, step by step. A neat page.
· Corporate Information Bank (Japanese) and Global Corporate Information Services (Japanese Corps) - Two sites that are excellent gateways to finding out about Japanese companies, both those
that do business in the US and those that don't.
· Business Associations Database - A huge
list of professional, commercial, industrial organizations; can help you do background research on an entire field of business.
Public Records:
· State Incorporation Records Online - Here's an up-to-date list of all states' pages that have their corporate records available online.
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EXPERT WITNESSES:
Some people want to be found. Listings where experts can make the availability of
their services known are many and varied. Here are just a few.
· Expert Witness -- Links
· Expert Witnesses on the Net
· ExpertPages
· U.S. West - (70 million listings!)
· Rominger Expert Directory
· Find Expert Witnesses on Net
· Nat'l Consultant Referrals, Inc.
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Miscellaneous Sites:
Some Useful, Some Interesting, Some . . . ?
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