CYPERSLEUTHING ISSUE 10 - April 12 - 20 2002 - Your Own Executive Search

Vol. 1 Issue 10 - April 15, 2002 - Your Own Executive Search

In this Issue...

HOW TO CONDUCT YOUR OWN EXECUTIVE SEARCH -
USING PAID SOURCES

Locating an executive may seem easy at first because they tend to frequently be in the limelight. However, there are many challenges in identifying and locating the right executive for your recruitment needs.

The Internet may well prove to be the best source of leads for executive recruitment. In this series we will learn about how to find our own executive leads using paid sources, search engines, annual reports and free alternative websites.

In this first installment of the "Using Paid Sources" section we would like to reveal our favorite source: www.eliyon.com. Since 1999, Eliyon has been providing a unique Web-based premium service.

The Eliyon service extracts information about people and companies through extensive daily Web scanning. The service then compiles results into a searchable database. Currently boasting leads from almost 3 million companies and over 7.5 million records including at least the individual’s name, title and organization, this constantly growing service is invaluable for executive research.

We discovered that there are an impressive variety of job titles in Eliyon records ranging from Board Members and major Corporate Officers to Managers and Engineers. A majority of records point to executive leaders, like Directors and VPs, but there are a significant variety of individual contributors.

In fact, Eliyon’s single major advantage over competitors like Hoover's and Onesource is lack of discrimination. Where most other sources focus on profiling only executive leaders, Eliyon will help identify anyone even mentioned on the Web in any context, regardless of their professional level or achievement.

The technology used consists of three separate elements. A crawler visits websites and retrieves content. An extractor takes the necessary information from the websites found and places it in the database. Finally a combination module organizes and joins together data about one individual from several sources, combining multiple references into a single record. Records for each individual remain linked to the original Web location where data was initially located, enabling the user to perform additional searching outside the database as needed.

With natural language processing and artificial intelligence, the system reads nearly every news article, press release, company website and SEC filing published on the Web. From there it extracts information about people and companies like name, title, corporate information, previous employment and education.

Each day about half a million webpages are processed. Useful records can be identified by using simple, but powerful search boxes. These searches allow for finding records by job titles or company names, biographical information, universities, news sources, individual names and company descriptions.

A free test drive is available from their website at www.eliyon.com. The trial offers limited access but effectively demonstrates how it works and the kind of information resident in its database. Queries are limited to title and company name, and only the first 20 results show up on this trial. A 3-day full, unlimited trial version costs $99.

One more source we would like to mention today is www.onesource.com. Their Business Browser offers information online unlike anything else available in the market. OneSource is true market research, analysis and competitive intelligence all in one source. The Browser compiles articles, numbers, financials, news, analyses and other information from the world's most respected data sources into one place. We recommend this to help identify prospects, prepare for sales calls, evaluate competitors, investigate potential targets, track competitors and benchmark your peer groups.

You can profile public and private companies for a complete business summary including recent news, articles, financial reports and corporate affiliations. But the primary value is that OneSource offers detailed and comprehensive executive listings. Along with all the other information OneSource offers, it can also be used as a one-stop shop for executive leads. Unlike Eliyon, OneSource offers premium content frequently not published online free of charge. Also, unlike Eliyon, their price is prohibitive, because they are designed for large organizations that can afford tens of thousands of dollars in company-wide licensing fees.

In the next installment we will review Nexis, Marquis Who’s Who, Dunn & Bradstreet, Leadership Directories and Leads411. After completing the "Paid Sources" review we will move on to discuss finding executives to recruit using alternative means, search engines and annual reports.


WISENUT

This recently launched search engine has grown quickly. It is easy to use with a simple interface and powerful features. Wisenut uses a similar page ranking relevance engine. It looks at both link structure and popularity, similar to what Google does. That is not the end of the comparison, but I will state that, in my opinion, Google is not at risk of loosing its number one spot to Wisenut any time soon. Wisenut offers some things to help you refine your search along with some features, which make it an excellent additional search engine. Of prime interest is Wisenut's feature that automatically categorizes your results into "Wiseguides" that are related to words in your query. Each "Wiseguide" displays the number of results it contains. When you run a search, open up a "Wiseguide" category by clicking on a white text link in black background above your search results. Clicking the plus icon next to the category opens the search results for that category and reveals any additional subcategories. Each category has a link to its right called "Search This" allowing for an easy new search using itself as the new query.

Like many other search engines, Wisenut compresses results from individual sites, the difference is they have created a very convenient "See X more pages from this site!" format. Wisenut's compression is unique in that, instead of the plain old "more results from this site" link, Wisenut lists the exact number of pages on a website that it has determined are relevant to your query. The niftiest innovation on their results pages is the ability to "Sneak-a-Peek" which opens the target page into a small window below the results page. These peeks may be cached pages and eliminate some mouse movements thus saving time.

One of the main reasons this new search engine is very useful for recruiters is its size and freshness. Although it’s not as big as Google, Wisenut's index is growing quickly. Because Wisenut's robot can allegedly read 100 million URLs a day, it's likely that it will be able to give you fresh results even from pages only recently added to the Internet.

Thanks to www.searchenginewatch.com and www.researchbuzz.com for inspiration in this series. Also visit www.jobmachine.net to see the Search Engine Rankings for Recruiters and the brand new Spyglass.


NEWS-------------------GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGLE-----------------NEWS

Google, our darling search engine, has announced a new service now in its beta stage and open to suggestions. This new service, a news service, is located at http://news.google.com/ and offers five different sections: World , US , Business , Entertainment , Technology and Sports headlines all in one page. Each headline will show a major story and up to four closely related pieces from different sources, citing the source within the results line. The headlines are all up-to-date and fresh. The very first red bar indicates the date and time that page was last updated.

Now in addition to Categories, Phonebook, Stock, Map and Dictionary suggestions, Google will return News whenever there are fresh relevant headlines related to your search.