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Herold Announces Database of Private Oil Companies

John S. Herold, Inc. has launched the Herold Private Oil Company Database, with compiled data on 700+ privately-owned oil and gas companies in the United States.

Data includes corporation and financial information from public records and direct correspondence with the companies. Additional facts on personnel, affiliated companies, and reserves are also included, along with
M&A transaction records . I cannot find a demo of the database at the Web site, but you can learn more about it at http://www.herold.com/pocdb.htm.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Microsoft Products

Yeah, yeah, I know -- REAL lawyers use WordPerfect. But just in case you find yourself having to use Excel or something...
http://www.microsoft.com/enable/products/keyboard/keyboardsearch.asp
is brought to you by Microsoft (natch) and provides a drop-down list of Microsoft Products (from Access 2000 to Word 97; programs covered include Internet Explorer and Outlook) Choose one, click search, and you'll be
presented with a table of keyboard shortcuts. There's a text-only link with each table that I thought might help if you wanted a printout, but I couldn't get it to work in either Opera or Mozilla.

Congressional Quarterly Launches cq.com

The Congressional Quarterly has announced the launch of a new Web site at http://www.cq.com. The site features a daily bulletin that's also available as a midday e-mail.

Additional features include The Scoop, a continuously updated news column by Derek Wills, a top breaking news article of the day, CQisms, a weekly column by Alan Greenblatt, and annual indexes of CQ Weekly from 1998.

This site also offers a free trial of CQ.com on Congress. This service offers free e-mail alerts of issues and legislation you're interested in tracking, including status of bills (with bill summaries), committee coverage, and transcripts
of select oral testimony and all written submitted testimony. You can get to the free trial at
http://www.cq.com/products/products.jsp?file=/products/webtrial/welcome.jsp.

Pulitzer Unveils St. Louis Online Guide

Pulitzer Inc. has launched STLtoday (http://www.stltoday.com/), "the definitive online guide to living in St. Louis," which will replace St. Louis' former site at postnet.com. The new site offers entertainment events, jobs, and real estate, in addition to news and sports from local and national
sources. An enhanced search capability delivers only information pertaining to the St. Louis area.

Tabs across the top lead the viewer to business, news, sports, entertainment, jobs, auto, real estate and neighborhood sections. A drop-down list provides links to additional features like crosswords puzzles, local
coupons and even the YellowPages. Links to daily weather, features, and forums are listed on the right. Pretty good site. Worth a look.

COMPAREWebDesigners.com Launched

Bear Technologies, Inc. has launched COMPAREWebDesigners.com, for online searching of global web designers and developers.

Web Designers and Web Hosts can be searched alphabetically or power-searched to compare by such criteria as fees, platform, and available options. Web resellers can also be searched by name, location, or
options. The Specialty Hosting page provides information on various types of specialized hosts with links to their web sites, and they can be compared
"head to head."

There are currently over 650 listings on this site, though there are some sections that are not quite complete (like parts of the designer showcase.) Worth a look just to get a sense of what's out there.

Northern Light Adds Newspapers to Its Special Collection

Search engine Northern Light (http://www.northernlight.com/) announced today that it has added The New York Times and over 100 papers from the Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News service to its special collection. That brings their special collection count up to over 7,100 periodicals and
research reports.

Searching the special collections is free. Retrieving articles costs, with the cost varying depending on the article.

Excite Adds Zoom In

Excite@Home announced last week the addition of Zoom In to their search engine tool. You can use the tool at http://www.excite.com/search.

If you've used any other context search engines, this should look familiar. There's a query box with two buttons next to it: "Search" and "Zoom In." Search means search. "Zoom In" means query the database for
possible narrower search terms that are related to the original search term.

When you click the "Zoom In" box a pop-up box appears (ugh) suggesting additional search terms. (The box, in my experience, doesn't work properly in Opera; it works fine in Mozilla.) Some of the suggestions are less than helpful; zooming in on Whoopi Goldberg suggests no less than four misspellings of her name. Once you've picked a zoom, search proceeds as usual.

I found myself less than impressed by the implementation of this idea and the suggestions it provides. Oingo, even using a much more limited index,
did a better job with the terms I searched. 

Searching the special collections is free. Retrieving articles costs, with the cost varying depending on the article.