I'll have to spend more time going thru them. Sometimes hard to separate marketing hype from reality without actually getting the product or service. Seems strange that AIMR doesn't want to develop an endorsement program, and recover their costs by charging a fee to display an approval logo. These companies can claim anything they want, which surely isn't in the best interest of the candidate (especially the ones fotting the bill out of their own pocket). It also seems east coast folks have an advantage as far as available services.
Dave's search technique:
I think I found most of them using Infoseek, with a search for "CFA chartered financial analyst" (or something along those lines) but had to weed thru a lot of garbage to find them. The good hits from the search usually have links to a couple more good sites, so once you get rolling, the data starts pouring in. After Infoseek, I generally search for the same thing with HotBot, Excite, Yahoo, and Lycos.
If you set your "visited links" color different than "unvisited links," and set the "retain history for..." field to a couple-few days, you can get thru all the listed search engines in your spare time over a couple of days, and know which links not to follow if they've been "already visited."
As a general practice deveolped over thousands of hours of search engine use, I'd say I look at about the first 50-100 hits for Infoseek, and the first 30-60 for the others, but if I have about 12-15 in a row that are totally unrelated, I stop the current search no matter how many links I've already followed (the use of Infoseek as the first search engine applies to searches for "technical content" only.
For things like consumer product searches I'd say Yahoo and Excite give better results. Have no idea what's different about their search algorithm to cause this but following that general pattern has worked well for me.
Another thing I do is I give a site about 10 seconds max to come up. If it doesn't, I hit Stop, then reload it. If it still doesn't come up, I skip it and move on. Too many links to check to sit and wait. If it has too much cutsie graphics that take too long to load, I skip it also.
One feature I wish browsers had is a third color highlight to show links you attempted to visit, but didn't get thru, so you can go back and check them at a different time when the server load might be lower. Also, I generally don't spend too much time on any given page (maybe 1 or 2 minutes) while I'm in search mode. If it looks even remotely useful, I bookmark it and go back and give a more thorough look at the bookmarked links as a group later. If there's obviously only 1 specific thing on the page that's of use to me for the current search, I print it but don't bother bookmarking it (but be sure the URL is printed as a footer on the page).
Then I weed thru the bookmarked sites and give them a more thorough review. I delete the ones that don't have much useful content, and put the remaining ones in an appropriately-labeled folder. Since Bill Gates just forced me to switch to Internet Explorer from Netscape, I had to find a utility to convert Netscape bookmarks to InternetExplorer favorites. If you ever find yourself similarly arm-twisted by Bill, let me know because I found a slick, painless utility for this that ALSO allows you to synchronize your Netscape bookmarks with your IE favorites if you have both browsers loaded and use them both. I've given up and am convinced that you don't want a Netscape browser on a machine running a Microsoft operating system. I'm also more convinced than ever that every portfolio should have at least some Microsoft stock. Mind as well reap some reward from this arm-twisting, after all :o)
dh |
