You are here: Fairness.com > FAQ > Getting Information about People, Products, Services, and Organizations

  1. Does Fairness.com provide information to help buyers get the best prices on products and services? If not, can you refer me to reputable companies to help me avoid nightmare purchases?

  2. Can you give me address information such as email address or phone number for a company I need to contact or locate?
  3. Can you give me address information such as email address or phone number for a person I need to contact or locate?
  4. Can you give me the email address or other contact information for the Author of an Article I found on your site.. or can you pass on a message to that Author for me?
  5. Can you give me address information such as email address or phone number for an organization I need to contact or locate?
  6. Where can I find information about what government agencies handle a certain issue, or find contact information for an agency or official?
  1. Does Fairness.com provide information to help buyers get the best prices on products and services? If not, can you refer me to reputable companies to help me avoid nightmare purchases?

    2. When we find good articles on such topics we link to them on our site, but at the present time we don't have the research staff to do more than that (i.e. do our own research or respond to questions about specific products or services). To avoid conflicts of interest we don't make referrals to commercial organizations.

    We have, however, gathered some links here to sites that we hope will be helpful to you (and please let us know of other sites that we might add to this list):

    Consumer Research Sites

  2. Can you give me address information such as email address or phone number for a company I need to contact or locate?

    3. Unfortunately we don't have any research staff to find such information... but we can pass on some general suggestions you might try:

  3. Can you give me address information such as email address or phone number for a person I need to contact or locate?
    4. Unfortunately we don't have any research staff to find such information... but we can pass on some general suggestions you might try:

    • Try to find a reference via a search engine such as Google or a general directory such as http://www.switchboard.com .
    • If the person is a journalist or writer, check websites that give journalists' websites (the only one we know of is http://www.sree.net/tips/journosites.html, but there must be others!) or contact the publishing company they are affiliated with.
    • Try some of the many specialized search tools suggested on resource lists such as http://websearch.about.com/od/peoplesearch/
    • Contact professional or industry trade groups they might belong to.
    • Ask your local public library reference department for help.
  4. Can you give me the email address or other contact information for the Author of an Article I found on your site.. or can you pass on a message to that Author for me?

    5. All but a handful of the articles we abstract and link to on our site were written by journalists working for other publications, and we don't have any contact information to provide beyond the information we publish on our site as part of that author's personal profile. Unfortunately we don't have staff available for researching contact information.

    You should carefully check the website where the article first appeared; writers' names are often given out as an email link or their email addresses given at the bottom of an article.

    If that information isn't available on the original site of publication, your best bet is to contact their publication; have a staff directory page somewhere on the site, sometimes with a link on "Contact Us" or "About Us" pages. If this doesn't work try doing a search for the publications name plus the keywords "staff" and "directory".

    Here is a sample staff directory page, current as of August 2004:

  5. Can you give me address information such as email address or phone number for an organization I need to contact or locate?

    6. Unfortunately we don't have any research staff to find such information... but we can pass on some general suggestions you might try:

    • Organizations that have websites (and most do) are easy to find via a search engine such as Google.
    • Try http://www.switchboard.com and other online directories.
    • Contact professional or industry trade groups the organization might belong to.
    • Ask your local public library reference department for help--- they usually have one or more print directories listing companies and non-profit organizations.
    • If looking for a company, find a non-competing company in the same industry that has a corporate library and see if they can help you.
  6. Where can I find information about what government agencies handle a certain issue, or find contact information for an agency or official?
    7. For those seeking information about government agencies, here are some very helpful online information sources: