Hoover's

When you approach the Hoover’s business research site, it is obvious that it is a properly thought out resource.

Whether you are opening up the initial home page or accessing more complex data later on, each page is consistently laid out well. The design, the typography and the toolbars all complement each other perfectly. The somewhat loud corporate blue and yellow livery on the home page is something you get used to with time.

Following a significant investment from parent company Dun and Bradstreet (D &B) into Hoover’s earlier in the year, the service now offers better relevance for the UK market. The money has in part been spent on enhancing the news service and further augmenting the data available to customers.

The price is like the length of a piece of string, with cost largely depending on your specific requirements. For example, access to the vast database of 28 million companies will probably not be needed by most customers.

In addition, the site contains editorial analysis and insight into the world’s top 65,000 businesses, and provides updated tracking of key figures, including decision-making managers in the organisation, and not just the CEO.

Neat and tidy
Once you are logged in to Hoover’s, it is easy to work out exactly what to do. The language and terminology are clear and there is a general refusal to resort to jargon. All the different areas a researcher will want to access are placed logically. The effect is of a compartmentalised and neat interface.

After choosing to search by company, person, industry or news, you are given a list of the most likely resources from the database. The most heavily documented results are given a three coloured blobs rating and typically (although not always) appear in order of relevance on the results page.

Once you have clicked on one of the result links, a brief company overview will appear alongside contact details.

Of the organisations I searched, most contained links to a full overview provided by Hoover’s editorial team. A little lower down the page, there is space for key business and financial information such as the organisation’s registration numbers, links to related organisations and parent company information. The key numbers such as the fiscal year-end and other important financial data are readily available.

Thereafter a list of key people such as executives and directors are linked to. The more senior players tend to have well-outlined career biographies and their achievements listed. Hoover’s allows subscribers to add information about themselves to the list, which is a nice touch, as is the option to network to a particular individual or company.

Hoover’s also lists the significant developments in an organisation’s history. A section highlighting key competitors is also provided, as is the option to search by SIC, D-U-N-S or NAICS financial codes.

It is very reassuring to see that after only a few steps from the original search the site offers up everything a researcher might need to know within a couple of clicks. Despite the many specialised business sites that exist on the web, it is rare to see one so helpfully and logically laid out.

Editorially, the timeliness of the data generally seemed as good as anything that is published by the companies that Hoover’s analyses. For example, IWR’s parent company Incisive Media only publishes its balance sheet data up to 2005 online. By contrast, the massive conglomerate Unilever goes up to 2006. Links through to each company website, where annual reports and the like can be viewed, were available in each case that I looked at.

Up to the minute
And if that isn’t up to date enough there are other areas in the page where you can view more timely information about an organisation, including any significant developments for a company.

To test how fresh it was, I looked up the ongoing case of who runs the British/Russian oil company TNK BP. The unevocative, yet simple entry from Hoover’s editorial ends with: “Unhappy with the company’s performance, in 2008 AAR went public with its bid to buy BP’s stake in TNK-BP.”

A search of any news site will reveal much more to this corporate battle than that. But in fairness to Hoover’s, it links to dozens of other global news sources which tell a far more detailed (and colourful) account of TNK-BP’s internal struggles. While this editorial stance from Hoover’s cannot really be faulted, it would have been useful if the latest news results were cross-referenced with the company overview to flag up such developments rather than leaving it up to users to find out what other coverage exists.

A new element to the Hoover’s site is its List Builder tool. List Builder is simply a means for cutting out unnecessary data on a company or industry to build up a criteria-specific list of the exact information you want to work with.

The tool itself reflects the rest of the site in its ease of use. It consists of a series of drop-down menus to choose from. The seven main categories all work interdependently to produce a specialised set of results.

List Builder allows users to search via a broad area such as company, size, location and industry.

Within a couple of steps a search can be targeted to very specific criteria – for example, annual sales growth or the month a company announces its fiscal year-end. You can also drill down further as Hoover’s provides employee demographic data, such as age, salary and bonus.

Overall, Hoover’s worked pretty much flawlessly for me. In a research specialist’s hands, it will be an even more powerful tool.

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