| Find Vendor, Customer, and Competitors’ Information Using Yahoo Pipes Search Products Richard Torian October 14, 2009 Introduction. Knowing certain information about your vendors, customers, and competitors can help your company be more successful. A lot of this information should be obtained by direct contact with the vendors and customers during normal business transactions. Competitor information can also be obtained directly. But, another way of obtaining useful information is through the use of the Internet. Although the information obtained by the Internet may not be as useful as through direct contact, the Internet should still be used to obtain what is available. Finding information on the Internet that is useful can be difficult and time consuming, if not impossible. Therefore, more efficient and effective methods to search the Internet should be of interest to companies. Using applications such as Yahoo Pipes offers potential for having to spend much less time and be less difficult to find useful information on the Internet. The purpose of this article is to identify five Yahoo Pipes Search Products which expedite obtaining vendor, customer, and competitor (company) information on the Internet. The following five sections identify each Yahoo Pipes Search Product and the information that is obtained. 1. Company Information. By entering a company name in this Yahoo Pipes Search Product, the Internet is searched by the Yahoo search engine for websites with information on the company. Right click here to bring up the search product in a new window. YouTube and Flickr are also searched for videos and pictures that have the company name in the title and descriptive information. Information provided tends to be factual, data-type. 2. Social Site Comments About the Company. This Yahoo Pipes Search Product searches several social media site databases for hits that contain the company name. Right click here to bring up the search product in a new window. Several sites, where much “social” exchanges take place, are searched. Information provided tends to be comments made about a company. 3. Company Locations, Locally. This Yahoo Pipes Search Product will provide you the names, contact and other information, and locations on a Yahoo Map for those companies that the business type (e.g. function, service, product, category, etc.) is entered into the search box. The results are for all those companies having the business type in their name or description and also located within 20 miles of the zip code entered. Right click here to bring up this search product in a new window. The source of this information is Yahoo Local. This search product is especially suitable for companies seeking local vendors or the identity of nearby competition. 4. Photographs and Videos Showing a Company’s Products. This Yahoo Pipes Search Product will search the Flickr and YouTube databases for photographs and videos that mention a product name in the title and/or description associated with the photograph or video. Right click here to bring up this search product in a new window. Information provided by this Yahoo Pipes Search Product provides good visual and evaluative information on products associated with a company. This search product should be useful to decisions about vendors (what vendors might provide the product desired) and information on competitors’ products. 5. Prices of Company Products. This Yahoo Pipes Search Product searches eBay and Yahoo Shopping for the company product that you enter. Returned are the links to the eBay and Yahoo Shopping sites that have sales price information for the product. Right click here to bring up this search product in a new window. Information provided by this search product should be useful when a company needs to make decisions about whether a vendor is offering an acceptable price and in making company product pricing decisions. Final Comments. The five Yahoo Pipes Search Products described above should make finding information related to a company a lot easier than starting from scratch using a search engine. The search products described were created using the Yahoo Pipes application. This application provides methods for creating a “pipe”. One advantage that a created pipe has is that different information sources can be brought together and serve as one source of information. Another advantage is there is a great amount of flexibility in filtering information out from the combined source, leading to very relevant results. Also, results can be “mashed” together, meaning results can be associated in such a way that a "combination" (mash) is created, such as in the case of location information for a store also being shown on a map. The products described result from the skills and innovative capability of the creator, which in my case, is limited. So, the Pipes described here certainly might be able to be improved upon. Please click here to return to the Management Accounting Information Center front page. Please click here to send an email with comments on this article. |