Whether you are in a large city, a suburb, or in a rural area, you now have access to many kinds of small business information from within the familiar setting of your own office or home. Simply by firing up your computer and going online, you can find information on starting a business, writing a business plan, financial planning, marketing, and bringing your business onto the Web.

You can find numerous E-mail lists over which you can discuss and network on small business issues. You can also benefit from the insurance, health plan, and business services offered under the umbrella of small-business organizations. In fact, the problem has become one not just of finding information but one of separating the Web sites that contain general tutorials and strategies, from the many more that are of very limited content and scope. In this article, I will provide you with some information-finding strategies, and a number of places to start your explorations.

URL
The power of the Internet is that by specifying a URL (Universal Resource Locator) to a Web browser such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer, you can almost instantly be looking at information provided for you on Web pages around the world. At this point you have options like printing the information you see, saving it to your own computer, or E-mailing it to a friend. You can also save the URL as a bookmark so that you can easily return to it later. Often the links on a few pertinent pages will lead on to even more information about a topic that you are researching.

The difficulty of using the Internet comes in knowing what URL to specify to get started in the first place. Finding specific Web sites relies on one of three techniques: using a subject index; using a search; or following a hypertext link from a Web page that you already know about. Sometimes a combined strategy is the most effective. For example, a search might teach you more about the terminology of what you are looking for, but still be too difficult to narrow down. Given that newly learned terminology, however, you might be able to find what you want in a subject index. Many subject indices also allow you to limit a search to a specific category. Yahoo! lets you search its entries while limiting the search to the subject you are currently within. 

Refined Searches
If you already have bookmarks to Web pages with subjects closely related to what you are currently interested in exploring, consider taking a quick look at the hypertext links they provide to other pages. You may already be just one or two direct jumps from exactly the page you are looking for. Next take a look at a hierarchical subject list, such as the ones provided by Yahoo! or Google. The hierarchical structure lets you quickly refine your browsing to a subject topic. I have found this hierarchical approach very useful, for example, in finding information about chronic inflammation or auto-immune conditions that massage therapists encounter. Many times you will turn up a list linking to several closely related topics. Finally, if a subject search is not quickly succeeding, try a general search engine.

Each search engine has its own method for specifying what words or phrases you want to find and what terms you want to avoid. It is well worth the short time required to read a search engine’s help page to better understand your options. My personal workhorse has been the advanced search option available on the AltaVista engine. This advanced syntax lets me preserve the word order of phrases by enclosing them within quotes; as with “business plan.” I can find words beginning in a common prefix by ending the prefix with an asterisk, lymph* finding both lymph and lymphatic. Finally, I can use conjunctions such as “and,” “or,” “not” and “near,” and parentheses to combine and group my keywords. Google provides a simpler interface, merely assuming that all words specified should occur simultaneously in the pages it returns. Other search engines, such as Snap, use the plus sign (+) before a word to require that it be found in all of the search results and the minus sign (-) before a word to require that it not be found in any of the results.

Become The Expert
With these words of advice to help you along the path to becoming your own information research expert, what remains is to provide you with some good places to get started. That is the purpose of the general indices and search engines list (see sidebar). It provides several search engines and hierarchical directories, some government sites with a small business context, and a number of other sites and organizations that have information about or support small business enterprise. 

Keith Eric Grant is the senior instructor of Sports and Deep Tissue Massage at the McKinnon Institute. He is also the Websmith of the McKinnon Web resources http://www.mckinnonmassage.com/. Grant is a computational physicist, an avid dancer and an advocate of teaching orthopedic massage techniques within the greater contexts of kinesthetic awareness and communication skills. He can be contacted at: keg@ramblemuse.com, or via the McKinnon Institute, 2940 Webster St., Oakland, CA 94609-3407.