Northwest Research

I just added the Stanford Development Research Blog to my sidebar. It looks highly informative for both beginners and for more advanced researchers.

Manta is a business database that offers free and pay-as-you-go business information.

According to the marketing materials, Manta gives Web users access to data and analysis from the most trusted business publishers in the world, including D&B, Newstex, Snapdata, Datamonitor, and ICON.

I’ve registered for Manta, and I’ve found the free information very useful. The sales numbers for privately held companies appear to come from Dun and Bradstreet, and I’ve found company information I haven’t been able to find using other free resources. It even appears that the slice of D & B that Manta is using is fresher than some other fee-based sources.

I re-found this very interesting link today

Mongabay

This organization provides information on wealthiest and poorest zip codes, cities and states. Very interesting for data mining your own database. It is also broken down by state for wealth. All information appears to be based on IRS data.

Enjoy!

I haven’t found a simple page for Washington State assessor, but you can find all county pages here:

http://www.mrsc.org/countyprofiles/profilesmenu.aspx

Links, email addresses and phone numbers for all of Oregon’s county assessors can be found here

http://www.oregon.gov/DOR/PTD/County.shtml

I’ve recently set up a simple blog that discusses some basic resources at Northwest Research Resources

The blog focuses on simple resources for beginning researchers, with a special focus on resources helpful to those in the Pacific Northwest.

I’ll continue to blog new and cool things here.

Enjoy!

Here is an interesting and somewhat incendiary article from Sunday’s Oregonian on Philanthropy and naming buildings:

The John Q. Public Memorial Anything

Happy New Year!

I’m always surprised by what I don’t know, and what other people don’t know.

While training a beginning researcher (of the “Congratulations you are now a researcher” variety) I discovered that she didn’t know search basics, like how to create an exact phrase search in Google, so I dug up the Google Basic Search Help Page

From the basic search page, I learned that Google is now automatically stemming searches! This is not particularly good for researchers, as it also stems on names now.

UPDATE TO ADD: After a little more research I found that putting a word in quotes or adding a + before a word will turn off stemming for a particular word.

From the Google Advanced Search Help Page I found out about the Google Synonym Search. If you want to search not only for your search term but also for its synonyms, place the tilde sign (“~”) immediately in front of your search term.

For example I searched for “Bill Gates” ~philanthropy and Google also substituted the word charity, foundation, and community for philanthropy.

It isn’t perfect, but it may make general internet searching a little quicker.