Market Research Tools

Spoke provides detailed contact information for more than 60 million employees at over 2.3 million companies. Its data is aggregated from public records, internet data, and uploaded by Spoke members. The directory also contains company overview profiles. Spoke's free service is limited to 25 searches per day, but there are several paid membership options for heavier users.

DomainTools is a comprehensive domain name intelligence search tool. With records going back over a decade, use this tool to research domain names and find new opportunities to improve your website and protect your brand.

http://www.domaintools.com/

CORI is a digital library of contract information that contains over 690,000 contract items. Their results contain both executed contracts and contract forms for specific industries. Registration is required, but the service is free.

http://ronald.cori.missouri.edu/cori_search/

Provides company background, history, news, job openings and executive data.

www.zoominfo.com

Provides company filings dating back to 1994 and full-text search capabilities are available for the last four years of public company filings. Some documents are formatted with "interactive data" and company listings can be monitored via RSS feed.

www.sec.gov

Compare search volume patterns for various keywords and filter results by date, categories, and regions to view trending data. Google Insights also displays key headlines as points of reference on the trending graph.

http://www.google.com/insights

Intute is a free service that classifies research by subject and resource type for ease of use. Use Intute to limit your searches to results from resource types like business journals, professional organizations, case studies, mailing lists and discussions groups.

www.intute.ac.uk

Collects information about sites from various sources and creates a one page profile with relevant information. View key people, traffic data, trending overviews, similar sites, social comments, popularity, and more. Quarkbase is a great tool to use for a general overview before starting deeper research on a site or company.

www.quarkbase.com

Search copyright documents pertaining to books, music, art, periodicals, and any other works published since 1978. Tools are available to determine the copyright status of existing works and obtain copies of copyright documents. Copyright data regarding works published prior to 1978 are also available through this office, but not online.

www.copyright.gov 

Database of industrial manufacturers, distributors, and service providers. View product catalogs, related white papers, and recent web results for product/service categories. ThomasNet also provides free RFP and Contract Manager tools.

www.thomasnet.com

Business directory with searchable company profiles by name or industry. Their profiles include news archives, basic corporate data, and a database of contacts at target companies. Sort corporate database entries by division or management level to find new contacts. Even with its free account, Jigsaw does provide a limited number of free contacts.

www.jigsaw.com

Displays a visual relationship map between a target website or keyword phrase and other related websites using data from Google's index.

www.touchgraph.com

Provides transcripts of public company conference calls and allows full-text search of the content.

www.seekingalpha.com

Leading trend firm reviews emerging consumer trends occurring around the globe. Releases monthly briefings based on data collected by a global network of hundreds of individual spotters for accurate trend forecasting.

www.trendwatching.com

Provides advanced search capabilities of patent databases and allows downloading of patents applications and diagrams via PDF format.

www.freepatentsonline.com

Allows searching for job openings and limited job trends reports. Queries may be saved and then new results can be automatically sent to you via RSS.

www.indeed.com

WayBack Machine allows you to view the changes made to a website over time. Its archive contains 150 billion webpages that date back to 1996. Helps identify trends and patterns evidenced by the evolution of your competitor's websites.

 web.archive.org

Free statistics on website visitor traffic and trends to aid keyword strategy analysis. Also, Compete offers a free site comparison tool and subdomain lookups.

www.compete.com

Free financial and background information on thousands of public and private companies. Also provides limited executive data and brief competitive landscape surveys.

www.hoovers.com