Using Google to help you dig into UK companies

These days things are always moving forward and nowhere more so than the online world, looking back over the last 40 years its amazing to think that there wasn’t always the internet, I recall the days of the bulletin boards before we had the world wide web.  The World of finance is moving forward too, but not always as fast as the technology driven world of the web or put another way, finance and accountancy is often a laggard when it comes to embracing change.

Business remains in some ways much as it was 40 years ago, in the UK at least there is still an attachment to office paper, though in the last 10 years at least invoices increasingly being parsed in and sent out electronically.  Given the slow pace of change in finance functions this is likely to need another 10 years at least before the potential of this area is fully grasped.

Google UK dominates the UK online search marketplace, accounting for something like 90% of all served up queries.  This means Google is and must be a key “go to place” for information on UK companies.

Companies House is the UK Government department which handles the filing of annual company accounts.   It has been embracing open government and for the last six years at least has been making available its data for free. Given the somewhat clunky nature of their website and the huge amounts of data involved this means there is a vast amount of data available via the web, but it needs sites like ours to deliver that in a user friendly and informative way.

What can you find via a Google search?

A lot!  Seriously there is a huge wealth of information available on ever company, given there are 4.5million UK companies live at companies’ house, based on their May 2020 dataset that represents a lot of search information.

If you perform an exact match query which is the phrase you are searching for with “” around your search phrase Google will focus onto that exact phrase and return for you more focussed information.

Google News

Google has a news service which aggregates information from approved news providers, so the likes of the BBC, the daily mail etc.   This can be an interesting way to check for news stories. For example, if a company has released positive news stories or made large numbers of redundancies then these sorts of stories are likely to get picked up and appear in a Google news search.

Postcode searches

A postcode can reveal a lot about a business, for example Zoopla the popular online estate agency service can search by post code and show the values of properties based on recent transactions as recorded at the land registry.

Google Maps

A great feature of Google maps is the ability to see actual pictures of locations, this gives you the opportunity for a virtual site visit, seeing the premises of a business can give you great insights, such as the scale and nature of the premises, are they premium, large small, what sort of quality is the area concerned.   A residential property address in the North East is a world of difference in price to a residential area close to the centre of London.   Gaining this sort of information, is helpful to get an understanding of the company you are looking at and their likely financial capabilities.

Of course, you need to do your own research, having a residential address does not mean that property is owed etc.

But the great thing is that Google and to a lesser extent Bing, allow you to do just that, conduct your own research quickly and easily, anonymously, and free.

Using Reporting Accounts

Our site receives a growing amount of attention from the Search Engines, because we have such an extensive database of company information, and our Mission statement is to “become the leading UK provider of both free and pay as you go company information and business intelligence.”

We are constantly developing our site and extending the amount of information we collect and aggregate, so you get as good insights as possible into UK companies.

Google UK Ltd accounts can be found on Reporting Accounts just like all of the around 4.5million UK companies listed at companies house.  Our service offers free as well as paid for business credit report and business intelligence information.

Bio - Adrian is the CEO of reportingaccounts, you can also find him on his youtube channel