How to search companies

At first sight, the search form may look intimidating to some of you, but it’s really very simple, once you understand a basic concept: all the blanks you see are filters. Filters allow you to make your search more specific to what you wish to find. In most cases, you will not fill out more than one or two of those blanks.

If you do not fill any blanks in the form – i.e. no filters - and press “Search”, the result is a list of all the businesses contained in the database – for most purposes, useless. You do not pull out your Yellow Pages and read the whole book when you want to find a business, right? So, just take one or two minutes to go through an example:

You narrow your search down to make it more specific to what you want. For this example, let’s pretend you are looking for an attorney and you live in the Miami area, so press ‘Company search’ to open the search form (if you landed on this HELP page from the search form above, that form is already open in another window). In the Categories list - 1 - scroll and click ‘Attorneys’, then press the ‘Search’ button.

The search results looks like the image below. All the attorneys listed will appear, probably not what you want; it’s a big list and they are all over the country. Go back to the search form; this time, again click on the ‘Attorneys’ category and type “miami” in the blank labeled ‘City:’ – or type the first 4 digits of your zip code in the ‘Zip code:’ blank - and see the results. Now, that’s much better. Isn’t it?

By now, you are getting the idea: more filters make your search more specific; that’s good, since you never one to deal with more than one attorney (and if possible, not even one). Try other things, like only typing a word or two in the ‘Other info’ blank, or a word in the ‘Company name’ blank. Another couple of minutes playing with this, and you will be an expert searcher.

Using the search results

Here are some useful features of the search results:

- The results initially appear ordered alphabetically by the company name column. To order by another column, simply press the column title (white area, 1). Pressing the column title again will reverse the order of the items.
- Pressing any green row - 2 - will display all the information available for the business.
- If the number of records found does not fit in the page, a scroll bar – 3 - will be available to move up and down the list.