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Company research is a very important field, and you can buy datasets (D&S), appliances (Bloomberg) and software/Web apps (LSEG/Refinitiv, Factset) for this purpose. If your purpose is competitive intelligence, then including information from other sides is crucial. What are analysts saying? etc.
What are customers saying about products? And a lot of info is in financial reports and SEC filings if your target company is public. There are also commercial providers that let you register a set of Web domains and they will email you once there is a change anywhere, including the "diff" information (before > after), which is also useful for Competitive Intelligence. It is not trivial given a company name to find the set of homepages that belong to the company (called the "homepage finding" task in information retrieval, there are US government benchmarks on it, such as at the TREC conference, see trec.nist.gov). Once you have the homepage, it is not trivial to reverse engineer, from the Web presence, the org structure of the company (if large). One area that I am interested in a lot is finding out where companies are going.
For that, you can analyze what people indicate in interviews, R&D talks at more technical conferences, patent applications, acquisitions in unusual areas etc. - at large, this is called "horizon scanning". There is a lot of money in high-quality datasets about companies for investment management, and there is an under-supply of detailed datasets with systematic coverage of private companies. |