Jane Macoustra, TaiPan Research, is explaining CI and is moving on to global resources. Fuld & Co. has a list of resources. White papers cover a wide range of industries and countries. Use professional portals from banks, Federal Reserve, government, stock exchanges, regulatory agencies, local law firms, and specialist portals.

Synovate Consulting has a section called Insights with free reports.

When it comes to invisible web, consider UC Berkeley guide . Reverse lookup facility from Onelook , Wayback machine, InfoMine for the mining industry, Asian sources for manufacturers and suppliers, Asian resources, global newspaper sites, such as World Newspapers Online .

Moving on to Europe, IBN Country Reports, law firms and accountancy firms often provide free reports. Now a list of recommended sources.

Alison Stacey, of Webinfopro, is now talking about bias in searching, but it’s not just the sites, it’s how we search. The web is prone to bias because web content is rarely reviewed for quality and anybody can put material on the web. The structure and nature of the web contribute to the problems of bias, particularly in the present environment of SEO. User-generated content can contain bias (usually does, in fact) which in turn encourages somewhat emotional response. People can tell the difference between TV programs and ads, but they can’t on the web. This lack of awareness of bias, combined with the important role of the web and search engines, makes educating people important.

Definition of bias: The presentation of a particular subjective approach to a subjective or objective piece of information, coupled with an absence of balancing and compensatory approaches.

How to compensate for bias: deal with it from the outset, ask about perspective of page, and look for value-laden words, weak arguments, problems with statistics, and graphical cues. Lots of her tips seem to me to be useful not just for evaluating the quality of web sites and web information, but for general evaluation of unbiased information in any format.

Bias is everywhere. Bias isn’t necessarily bad, it’s what we do with it that counts.