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You can hear the webmasters of the world uniting with the chant, "More web content, more web content..." Screamer advertising headlines tempt, "When is someone going to make it easy, real easy, to get the research I want right off the web?" from USADATA.com, or "FREE, full-text access to research from 2,400 leading business publications to everyone in your organization" from Powerize.com.

So when you are done searching the obvious choices, like Yahoo!, and your boss or the client says its critical to your public relations role to know more about this subject, there are some new options.

More of us are asked to do the research before the plan on our own, today, this minute, with a browser and a connection to the Internet. (And, as the sketch on my wall will attest, "In the beginning...God logged on.") Competitive intelligence on the web is now highly niche-oriented and can simplify tracking and analysis of important data.

New York-based USADATA.com does have easy primary navigation that makes this site a great choice for searching for relevant consultant research reports already written. And you can, with a few simple clicks, search and access a large online aggregation of available consumer demographic profiles across a multitude of brands. Watch the dates on those reports, because the most relevant research is generally carrying this year's date. A quick search on 3D Animation markets for a client gave me a list of 10 relevant documents ranging from $2,000 on up from known research and analyst firms, like Frost & Sullivan. For specialized reports--their new "data-to-go" customized reports delivered to the client within 24 hours--you can enter into a live chat session to order. Reports can range from the correlation between people who lie to participate in particular sports to age and income statistics for specific cities or even a more competitive intelligence approach, such as a competitor's online advertising expenditures and placements. They also offer mailing lists with phone numbers and email in certain categories. And, they have created a portal system to deploy it across your entire organization through their Marketing Information Portal™. The MarketTarget™ graphical user interface being offered will assist in generating reports from your databases and/or their databases.

Reston,Va.-based Powerize.com falls into a category of websites that attempt to classify data by industry and company for other companies to search for competitive advantage. Free summaries by industry are now available in the following sectors: banking and financial, computers and Internet, energy and utilities, healthcare, insurance, media, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications. After a quick, complimentary look around the site you are asked to register by giving your email and name for access to most data. Free and for-fee data is available in a mixed offering. The fees are similar to other sites, under $5, for specific branded marketing reports or profiles, news articles, and research reports. Even patent filings are displayed under a search term, although not always relevant to your search. For example, a search under PNC will bring up metals with the acronym as well as the banking entity. The site currently references 11 million public and private companies.

For searching ready-made analysis of comprehensive financial information for a company and its peers, the product Compbook™ (compbook.xls.com) from Data Downlink Corporation established in 1996 in N.Y. and the United Kingdom offers a user-defined approach. This is a tool designed to assist in the analysis of comparative data. Financial data, earnings estimates, betas, mergers, and acquisitions information, equity issuance data as well as investment research and archival news headlines can be included in a Compbook.

Searching the database for companies you require is free, as is some basic financial data returned from a search, however you do pay for each report or sheet you require--the $3.00 to $8.00 range. Pricing is variable, based on the number of companies in the Compbook you have created and the amount of data available. The primary sources of financial data for the 20,000 companies in the system are Market Guide for the United States companies, and FT-Excel, which is used for European companies.

When a short answer from a press release or a financial analysis won't do, and you need more in-depth understanding, ebooks on technical, professional and academic subjects are accessible at two newer sites--net Library and fatbrain.com. net Library allows you to operate much like you would at a normal library, by checking out an eBook, viewing it online that minute, or viewing it offline by downloading it onto your computer. If a book is already in use, you can reserve it like a regular library. But, what makes this computer clicking worthwhile is the tremendous search capabilities. You can search for a phrase, or keyword and it will take you to the appropriate page. You can also highlight, bookmark, or annotate text, all of which can be saved and used if the eBook is viewed again. Several hundred titles a day are being added to the collection with a focus on reference, academic, and professional books. Signup for the public collection is free, but the subscription-based model of $29.95 applies for the private collection.

Fatbrain.com has spent a great deal of its public relations budget promoting its bookstore and eMatter collections. For research on a wide variety of topics, eMatter is worth a search. Here authors can post their own pieces from technical papers to chapters from books of varying lengths for a fee they set. Magazine publishers have seen an opportunity to republish print content for a small fee--$2 to $10, so articles of interest in professional categories are available as well. Among the players with content on the eMatter site are recognizable names, such as CAP Ventures, Inc., a leading market research firm covering the digital publishing industry; MacMillan USA, a leading publisher of computer information; and McGraw-Hill Professional Books Group; RAND Corp., publisher of articles and reports on public policy issues; and Nolo.com, a leading provider of self-help legal information. And, if you are a frustrated writer, you can explore posting your own original thoughts, be those white papers, professional topics, or fiction yourself. This is one medium where you don't have to be an established writer to get into the new form of "print."

Perhaps you started your public relations career using the big reference books by The Gale Group for media lists, for example; or their CD-ROM product, InfoTrac, launched in 1985, to retrieve periodical documents. The Gale Group has now migrated to a web-centric approach completely in mid-1999. Their online services called SearchBank and GaleNet were retired in favor of the single brand "InfoTrac Web." Simple extras that can make a difference in search include enabling library patrons to bookmark their searches for repeat use.

If economic and policy issues are more important to you, than using a product like Boardview® from The Conference Board, a non-profit business membership and research organization, could be helpful. The price is hefty, $7,000 to $8,000 per year, but special prices can be negotiated for academic institutions. This allows you 4,000 economic and statistical variables from ten different databases, such as Conference Board Short Term Economic Forecasts, U.S. Regional and State Economic Indicators, and International Economic Indicators. The price does mean access to The Conference Board staff economists and invitations to various conferences and special councils. The product was launched in 1994, but now is available to non-members as well. The graphics capabilities allow you to save multivariate charts of any combination in several styles and add your own company planning data. The product earned a Database magazine Editor's Choice Award in February 1999.

An up and coming service to watch is SkyMinder.com by CRIBIS Information Services (cribis.com) for those particularly interested in modest, pay-per-fee European business information. The navigation loads quickly and is intuitive. The website promises access to company and executive profiles, credit information, industry reports, financial data, new and public records, pertaining to more than 11 million US and European companies. Unfortunately Netscape browsers will have difficulty logging in until their programmers work out the bugs, and many of the fields are empty at the time of this writing.

Perhaps the most comprehensive tool for searching United States government data is usgovsearch.com by Northern Light. The bulk of the premium, pay-per-view content in usgovsearch.com comes from abstracts from the NTIS database that has been called the oldest and largest database in the history of online, by Searcher magazine. The current model at usgovsearch.com is a $5/day pass minimum plus nominal charges under $5 for various restricted content. A money-back guarantee applies for articles purchased. An annual pass costs $250. The database encompasses abstracts for U.S. government-sponsored research, development, and engineering (both in-house and contracted), plus abstracts describing analyses from federal agencies, their contractors, or grantees, in addition to foreign research from the Japan Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), laboratories administered by the United Kingdom Department of Industry, the German Federal Ministry of Research and Technology (BMFT); the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), plus others. For the traditional information librarian in the government space, more than 20,000 federal government home pages exist. Over 4 million web pages in the US government domain currently exist and are searchable through usgovsearch.com. The joint venture website combines the search engine technology of Northern Light with tremendous content, transforming known data into organized collections, 2 million records, that can be searched with more than 25,000 terms at present.

When all else fails, go to the search engine called google.com, and hit "I feel lucky." With a defined query, this beautifully-simplistic search site launched in September 1999 generally takes you where you need to go. And, we all need to lighten up and enjoy our work more.