fixed-rate commercial Internet db for power-SIC searching?

[KAREN SCHNEIDER]

At the risk of bogging down WEB4LIB with drearily practical
questions, we have been looking at several CD-ROM products
for searching for companies by SIC code and wondered if there
breathes a robust, Internet-accessible counterpart to business
directories such as American Business Disc (if it's commercial, it
must be fixed-rate or by-transaction).  

There are many websites where you can look up businesses,
some by SIC, and there is OSHA's wonderful online SIC code
manual (a great example of my favorite product, Book-Be-Gone),
but I have yet to find an Internet-accessible database, commercial
or free, that does that kind of powerful SIC code searching
*and* offers reliable, current  and extensive content, including
company names, addresses and key employees for millions of
businesses.  We often search by SIC code to see which
businesses are associated with a particular code, and we are often
looking up very small businesses.  (If it's on Edgar, for example,
we probably have that info anyway--though Edgar shore is a
good place.)  I should explain (and I will be patient when five
people point me to the same well-known sites, such as
Switchboard) that we have tested many good freebies out there,
and while they are fine for general lookups, particularly for
looking for individuals and large businesses, they do not have as
much info as the CD-ROMs we have evaluated.  Either they don't
have that many small businesses, or the data isn't current, or they
don't offer key data such as CEOs--and often lack that
search-and-display-businesses-by-SIC feature we need.  We
have noted that FirstSearch offers some very good business
databases, and we are about to purchase a pile o' FirstSearch
searches, but I am not sure there is a killer tool on FirstSearch that
meets this particular need.  We are planning to change from
CD-ROM to Internet-accessible commercial databases this fall,
where we can, and it would be nice to stay consistent with format
(and that good ol' web browser interface), plus Internet access is
more suitable for the more remote parts of our region.   

Thoughts?

karen g. schneider/opinions mine alone
schneider.karen at epamail.epa.gov