By T.J. Ripley, AIRS Journalist and Web Explorer

An easy-to-remember domain name doesn't guarantee a Web site's success. Recent closures by pets.com and furniture.com prove that point. But simple, descriptive names are valuable and can help generate Web traffic. Last year, hoping to create a Web site that would become synonymous with B2B, eCompanies bought the domain name business.com for $7.5 million. Now that the site is up and running, it's clear that Business.com is a valuable research tool that can help with your recruitment activities.

The site consists of a directory of hundreds of thousands of business and industry Web sites organized into over 25,000 categories. Researchers and industry experts manually compile these comprehensive lists of business-related sites. More than just a business directory, the site also includes detailed information about 10,000 U.S. companies and the people who run them.

There are three main groupings of information at the site: industry data, company information and news.

Industry information is the most prominent and most complete feature on the site. On the Business.com homepage industries are organized into categories in much the same way that Yahoo! organizes its content. Under each of the 22 main heading links (such as Aerospace & Defense or Retail) are links to more specialized industries. Selecting any of these links brings up a page chock full of information. For example, if you select Logistics under the Transportation industry, at the top of the page you'll find 16 subcategories such as E-Logistics, Logistics Information Technology and Third Party Logistics (3PL). Farther down the page are links to current news stories about the logistics industry, links to industry resources (associations, news and events) and links to Web sites of the businesses in that industry. Drilling down into these industries can unearth great resources to find either source companies or the professional associations to which your candidates belong.

Additional industry data is available if you click on the Find Industries link. This takes you to the Industry Center page which lists 58 different industries ranging from biotechnology to construction and from insurance to telecommunications. The industries listed here are tracked by the site in detail. A description and analysis of the current business climate of each industry is available, as are lists of industry events and news stories from the past week. This is a good area to check out for both an overall industry perspective as well as lists of special events.

For information about specific companies, click the Find Companies link. From here you can either conduct a search (by company name or ticker symbol) or scan through the links about companies in the news. However you get to the company information, there's no doubt about its value. You can get a glimpse of the company's business strategy, see where it’s mentioned in the press, track its stock performance, review a timeline of past events and check out who serves on its management team. You can even find compensation information and details about stock options. This is all great stuff regardless of whether you're involved in executive recruiting or just need to get a better sense of where a firm is headed.

News, the other class of information on the site, appears on the far right side of the Business.com homepage. Here are links to top business headlines from sources such as Reuters, Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. There are even links to three different WSJ audio programs - an hourly business report, a morning tech report and an afternoon tech report. In addition, news links appear throughout the site, being incorporated into both business and industry listings.

So the next time you're looking for business and industry information, just think business -- business.com, that is.

-- T.J. Ripley is a journalist and Web explorer who contributes to AIRS research and writing. This article is reprinted by permission from AIRS, a global leader in Internet recruitment, tools, news and information. For more information on AIRS, please go to: http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com/pages/airs.php. Copyright © Hanover Capital Management Corporation 1997-2001. All Rights Reserved