Vol. 1 Issue 15 - July 1, 2002 - Free Exec Leads in Public Domain


In this Issue...

  • Finding Free Exec Leads in the News
  • Finding Free Exec Leads on Their Company's Site
  • More Fuzzy Search Terms

FLASH COMMUNIQUE

Inktomi, the service that provides results to many popular search engines like Excite, AOL, HotBot, Overture, iWon, About.com and MSN can now be searched DIRECTLY. That's right, that was previously impossible!

Only available previously from partner search engines, each with their own separate rules and search algorithms, now you can directly access the raw Inktomi data from here.

NOTE: Not a joke or prank! This is absolutely for real. Access to Inktomi data is unaltered. Additionally, all commands available through partner search engines can be used.


HOW TO CONDUCT YOUR OWN EXECUTIVE SEARCH
Finding Execs in the Public Domain

Executives are key corporate figures in the public domain. In an information society like ours, many details about an organization's executives are in demand and publicly scrutinized.

Because of this, it's very easy to find out who's who in corporate leadership by putting together the jumbled details. We can form a very good picture of who an executive is, where they are and what they do.

The challenge is not in finding a bunch of names corresponding to some companies, that's "easy street." The real test is in identifying who makes the exact types of decisions needed and who would be a fit for the open position we have.

We learned in the last issue that executives are frequently revealed in detail on annual reports. However, companies not publicly traded, non-profits, privately held companies, partnerships, new ventures and many offshore businesses are not required to release annual reports. That's not the end of the line, however. With a little more work there are other ways.


News Sources

Virtually every company takes advantage of the free publicity and marketing opportunities afforded by the press. By announcing accomplishments and changes, including new executive assignments, they inadvertently reveal small pieces of the puzzle of an executive's full picture. Executive data snippets can be collected from many published sources like press releases, newspaper and magazine articles, and white papers.

Search engines are a good starting point to source data about a specific organization's executives. A simple search string including the company name "British Petroleum" and the keywords: Joins, Executive, Vice and President will reveal about 200 pages of data about executives who currently are or at some point were part of British Petroleum leadership. Depending on the size of the company or their Internet notoriety, we can easily replace the company name and the string still works. For example, from Google:


"TOSCO" Joins Executive Vice President

Reveals about 100 pages of data on TOSCO Executives, the Phoenix-based oil services company that owned Circle K and "76" among others and is now owned by Philips 66. However, replacing TOSCO with Cisco Systems yields over 2,500 results... far too many to be valuable. In this case, we just add a couple of skill-based keywords like Real Estate, Controller or Asian Sales.


CORPORATE WEBSITE

Executives can often be identified directly from their own websites with a straightforward search. It takes just two commands, but requires a little preparation. First we must identify the exact corporate website address, then make sure we want executives from the parent company and not a separate subsidiary, branch or division. For example, a search for Chevron executives leads us to find that Chevron is actually at www.chevrontexaco.com . We use that, plus the "intitle:" command like this:


site:chevrontexaco.com intitle:executive

This will work most of the time but not always. The search is effective replacing chevrontexaco.com with phillips66.com but not with bp.com. Primarily this is due to different countries' approaches to public information. Remember, BP is a British company. However, even in a European company there are other very revealing sources inside the corporate site.

News and press releases can contain information the company needs to make public for legal reasons, or simply to keep investors informed. The keywords News and Press are very useful. We still need to what the target company website address is and of course something to identify who we seek. For example:


(news OR press) site:bp.com vice president

Reveals approximately 24 pages of information about British Petroleum Vice Presidents. More specifically, adding the keyword finance as in "(news OR press) site:bp.com vice president finance" we identify pages which quickly tell us John Buchanan is the CFO and Greg Coleman is the Vice-President of Investor Relations reporting to him. Now we can search for those names specifically.


MORE FUZZY SEARCH TERMS

Fuzzy logic is a superset of conventional boolean logic that has been extended in order to handle the concept of partial matching so that search engines can return results somewhere between "a total match" and "no match at all". Dr. Lotfi Zadeh of UC Berkeley introduced the concept in the 1960's as a way to model the uncertainty of natural language. It's used today so that search engines can make an attempt at inferring what we mean when we perform a query.

What other kind of fuzzy searching can we do on major search engines?

Wildcards and Stemming

Wildcards are essentially fuzzy terms. They find all the words with a similar root. This is essentially the same as stemming.

Google and AllTheWeb don't support wildcards or stemming, but they have their own ways of being fuzzy as we will reveal below.

So who still uses this? AltaVista, iWon and Yahoo still use the asterisk "*". We use it when there are several versions of a word that should appear in our search. For example, when looking for a programmer we may also want to find people who have programmed, who are involved in programming or maybe have written a program. We would then enter the search as "program*" so the asterisk will replace anything to the right, spelling all the possibilities mentioned above and more.

Some of the Inktomi partners like AOL and iWon also use a wildcard operator that replaces only one character in a keyword, represented by the question mark "?". The question mark won't replace everything to the right, like the asterisk does. For example, when we need to find both DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) and SWDM (Selective Wave Division Multiplexing), two kinds of wave division multiplexing for optical carrier signals we could search for ?WDM instead. Or when we need both TDMA and CDMA wireless engineers we could search for ?DMA.

Finally, since Inktomi is what feeds AOL and iWon, we were very successful with question mark and asterisk fuzzy searches on the newly found Inktomi direct access search at http://169.207.238.189/ .


Find Similar

Sometimes a page in the search results is what we call a "Direct Hit to the Main Engine Room" or a perfect match. If only we could find everything closely resembling that one perfect hit then our task would be simple.

Some search engines have "Find Similar" features that tell the search engine to seek out other pages that seem similar enough to the one we thought was right on. In our tradition of efficiency, here is who does it and how it works:


AltaVista: Click on the "Related pages" link that appears at the bottom of each listing.
AOL Search: Click on the "Show me more like this" option that appears at the bottom of each page listed.
Google: Click on the "Similar pages" link that appears at the end of each listing. Teoma: Click on the "[More Results Like This]" link at the bottom of each listing

Example:
From Google entering a query for SONET DWDM we liked one of the first hits that was www.delloro.com . Clicking on "Similar Pages" we are lead to 22 results listing research reports about the optical industry, a page of contacts at Alcatel and information from major players like Lucent and Agere.


What's Related

The "Related" feature may help users hone in on what they seek. For example, say we searched for "Cisco." When the results appear there would be related search links like "Optical Routers" or "Telecommunications." Selecting one of them invokes a new search using the words we clicked on. The idea is that this makes the search more specific and could improve results.


AltaVista: Displays related searches right below the search box next to the words "Others searched for."
AllTheWeb: Displays related searches on a bullet list to the right of the results page, under the words "Narrow your search."
Excite: After a search there will be a section with a bulleted list two lines deep directly under the search box with the title "Are you looking for?"
HotBot: Displays related searches below the search box, under the "People who did this search also searched for" heading.
Teoma: Displays related searches as a menu on the left of the results page, under the "Refine" heading.
Vivisimo: The categories on the left are related subsearches. Clicking on the blue triangle will expand each category.
Webcrawler: Refer to Excite. It works similarly.
Wisenut: Displays WiseGuide categories in the region with a black background directly under the search box.
Yahoo: At Yahoo, related searches appear at the end of each results page in a link called "More sites about:"


***FREE JOBMACHINE SPYGLASS***

The Spyglass is a Seeker's "Magic Wand." Each letter of the word CyberSleuthing stands for a separate search engine. Using all of the letters improves the chance of obtaining the most comprehensive coverage possible. You can copy and paste the CyberSleuthing Spyglass to the top of a Word document. Use that document to save links to the search results you get, thus being able to keep a record of your searches. Visit the Spyglass here.