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How to Find Information on a Company  by Bill Brine

If you work online,  shop online and/or you are new to the whole deep internet search experience, you might wish for ways to protect yourself in future transactions or interactions. For example, if you are seeking work-at-home jobs online and need information on company X, you would want to do a specific search to discover the company’s standing in the community, to understand what the company does and how long it has been doing business, and to learn of any warnings about the company.  The techniques discussed here will allow you to begin this due diligence.

To get information on company X, you can start with the Better Business Bureau online. Go to http://www.bbb.org/. When you get to the BBB site, look at the first menu option, top left, that reads “CHECK IT OUT.” Click on the BUSINESS link (though if you wish to check out a non-profit organization—or one that claims to be non-profit, asking for donations, etc.—you can of course click on the CHARITY link instead). Fill in one of the fields, such as the name of the company and the address or the url (www.etc.) for information on Company X regarding business complaints and more.

Another method for getting information on Company X, one which allows a deeper investigation on your part, is one which will almost always reveal an address, how long the company has been online, and, usually, actual names of actual people. For this search, go to Network Solutions’ web page, http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jhtml. Type in the company’s url/web address. Find information on Company X —owner, web master, d.b.a. person; home base address (snail mail address); phone number(s); and length of time Company X has had established online presence.

Because domain registration is now a deregulated industry, the whois database at Network Solutions may not contain information on the company X website.  If that is the case, try going to www.betterwhois.com.  

Thie whois search for information on Company X might still seem to be lacking some information. However, this  is just  the starting info.. It will help you realize, if, for example, the company boasts of twenty years online, how long that company has had that website. Or if they are a service provider, for example, claiming to get you number one ranking, the same as they have!—but their ranking at WhoIs says NONE, and they have been doing business on this site for three months…well, you get the idea.

Here's a neat trick: go to the Internet Archive at http://www.archive.org/index.php and use their Wayback Machine to see previous versions of the company website.  This will again give you an idea of how long the company has been online and how their business has developed over the years.

For an even deeper investigation of information on company X, do the BBB search; then the WhoIs search; then use whatever information you gather to do a search using Google, MSN, Alta Vista, or some other search engine . Type in the company name and address together, or try putting a human name and phone number together as your search phrase. This will often turn up some interesting information. 

One very good trick is to search Google groups and look for "X sucks", where X is the name of the company..  This will often reveal if that company is not so good in dealing with its customers.  

You never know,  you may just save your life when you find that your thorough search on company X turns out to reveal that …Soylent Green is humans! Well, you get the idea...

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