If you find a site that you want to know more about it there are several places you can look. From these sites you can find out things like visitor/member numbers, how large the company behind the site is and what their annual turnover is like.
When researching a site or a company, a good place to start might be CrunchBase which will tell you all sorts of things about lots of different websites. Although this figure currently stands at just over 14,000 there is lots of information about each site. If any videos exist that talk about the company they are also included.
No research these days is complete without a check on Wikipedia and looking for companies on this site can reveal lots of information, especially regarding the history of the company.
This site contains lots of information about lots of websites, and is an interesting site in it’s own right. If you are looking for a site on this site and it isn’t found, aboutus.org will create the page automatically, using information from the site as a resource. The site is built upon a wiki and so it is possible for anyone to logon and update the site.
Ok, I might be scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one, but Alexa might be able to tell you something that the other sites haven’t. Although Alexa gives lots of information about traffic levels, the traffic is worked out by logging users who visit the site, and that have the Alexa toolbar installed. This is a tiny, tiny demographic of the web viewing public, and is heavily skewed towards users who are technical. For this reason the figures are deemed by some to be completely useless some and by others simply to be an indication of traffic levels. I am in the latter group, but still think that Alexa gives some interesting information.
If all else fails you could just try a whois lookup through whois.net. This will display lots of technical information about who owns a domain name, when and where is was registered and even what the domain servers are called. You might find that much of this information is missing for some top level domains. However, for top level domains ending in .co.uk it is a legal requirement that the domain name is held by a real life person, which must be included in the whois record. This site isn’t the only whois look up tool, but I find it very reliable.
Finally, there is one important thing to remember. Most of the information on these sites are taken from link like press releases. If you do some research for your own company and find that the information is incorrect or just not there then update it! It will help your online reputation in the long run by having lots of different sites that talk about you. Just remember that sites like Wikipedia will require you to be impartial about your data. So don’t use management speak, and don’t try to sell things on your site profiles. Just give the facts!
Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development
