Free Market Research Websites

Hoovers - Free Edition

www.hoovers.com

Free financial and background information on thousands of public and private companies.

Compete

www.compete.com 

Free statistics on website visitor traffic and trends for the past 12 months for thousands of companies.

ZoomInfo - Free Edition

www.zoominfo.com

Provides company background, history, news, job openings and executives.

Indeed

www.indeed.com 

Allows searching for job openings and limited job trends reports.  Queries may be saved and then new results can be automatically sent to you via RSS.

Free Patents Online

www.freepatentsonline.com

Provides advanced search capabilities of patent databases and allows downloading of patents applications and diagrams via PDF format.

Trendwatching

www.trendwatching.com

Review emerging consumer trends happening around the globe from one of the world's leading trend firms which employs thousands of individual trendwatchers.

WayBack Machine

http://web.archive.org

This site allows you to view what a particular company's website looked like in the past. Allows you to spot trends and patterns.  WayBack Machine has over 150 billion webpages in it's archive dating back as far as 1996.

Seeking Alpha

www.seekingalpha.com

Provides transcripts of public company conference calls and allows full-text search of the content.

SEC Public Filings

www.sec.gov

Provides full-text search capabilities for the last 4 years of public company filings.

TouchGraph

www.touchgraph.com

Displays a visual relationship map between a target website and other related websites using Google's index.