Northwest Research

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.

Qwika is a Wiki search engine. According to its marketing materials, it has translated wikis from 12 languages into English.The engine also includes WikiTravel and aims to include all sizable wikis.

I don’t rely on the Wikipedia for a great deal, but it can be useful when researching individuals whose (large) companies have recently been in the news.

Recently a new researcher I had trained was profiling an individual who was an executive at AOL in the 1990s. The organization was preparing to ask the donor for a major gift. I found the Wikipedia article about the AOL-Time Warner merger for her, which allowed her to understand how the stock had devalued during the Internet bust.

Qwika could be useful when researching businesses and individuals who are based overseas.

I looked at my site statistics today, and found that almost 40% of the visits to this blog are by using a Firefox browser.

I find this very interesting, because many of the sites I use regularly are not set up for Firefox. For example, when using Foundation Search I’ve had to switch over to Internet Explorer, because I am unable to get the site to let me save a window as a text file in Firefox. Other sitesare somewhat illegible in Firefox.

I don’t have Lexis, but I remember that I could never get Lexis to work with Opera, another browser, and I don’t know how if works with Firefox.

I hope vendors and information providers catch up soon. I think my blog readers are pretty representative of the prospect research community as a whole, which means that almost 1/2 of them can’t use many sites without switching browsers.

The Oregonian had an article on “The New Affluence” yesterday. It can be seen here.

The New Face of Affluence

What is most interesting is how many people in this article have earned their money through real estate and how little philanthropy is mentioned.

Hello All–

This isn’t really a prospect research tip, but I thought it was neat anyway.

I’ve been looking for a car on Craig’s List.

I’ve wanted to buy an inexpensive car from a private seller. I prefer a car that has been with a person for a while.

One of the problems of buying a (not very expensive) car on Craigslist is that there are a lot of people who purchase cars from auctions, or salvage cars from junkyards and launder the title.

These people don’t identify as dealers, and they often lie about the cars they do sell. Using Carfax can help show when a car has been sold, etc, but it doesn’t tell anywhere near the whole story.

I discovered that you can use the Craig’s List to search for phone numbers. So for example, if someone has a car you might want to buy you can search the number, in quotes, to see if they have any other cars available. You can also search the number in Google to see if there are any cached car ads, because Google does index most of Craigslist.

I think there may be other interesting uses for phone number searching, besides reverse phone number/address searching.

I found this today

http://www.hbs.edu/leadership/database/name/

Which provides little biographies, including birthdates and education
of some business leaders. Not very extensive, but might be useful for
quick and dirty research. I also like how it lets you see the list by undergraduate
college, place of birth, and gender.

I stumbled over this today

http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/company/private.html

Which is a guide to private company research available at the Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress also has a guide to public company research and international company research. These guides are designed to give someone searching for company information some ideas and strategies for finding this type of information.

The Library of Congress also provides other business services, including a great list of internet resources here:

http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/beonline/subjectlist.php

Enjoy our tax dollars at work.