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Once it became clear that Grand Forks would be evacuated, Palay knew what he had to do: load his family and the server holding the company's records into his minivan and hightail it to the office in Minneapolis. That office uses only dumb terminals, connected to the main server in Grand Forks by a 56 KB direct line. For inventory, he would have to rely on a stash of fixtures in Minneapolis. "If the server had gone under, we would have been done," says Palay.

With the shrill whine of air-raid sirens ringing in the Saturday night background, Palay--with his wife, Patti, and their three children--shoved their belongings and the server into the van and drove hastily off to Minneapolis. "It was scarier than heck," he says, adding that the scene brought to mind "London during World War II."

When Palay reached Minneapolis the next day, he spent about four hours rigging the dumb terminals to the server. "It's a pretty big deal for me to run a toaster," he says. Fortunately, he wasn't all alone. Minneapolis-based Saber Systems, Palay's hardware and software supplier, helped him work out the kinks. By 9 o'clock Monday morning, he'd rebuilt the network, and the company was up and running as if nothing had happened.

In fact, Palay may have been too efficient. Few of the company's 5,000 customers thought to place orders. Most just assumed that the small business would be closed for a while. "We worked hard to get everything smoothed out," says Palay. "It's tough, but you just get through it." --J.M.

Jockeying for Position

If you have a Web site, you've probably pondered the mystery of search engines. How do I get on them? How do I get my site to come out high on the list when someone does a search? Should I put "Heaven's Gate" in the text to get more hits?

Before you get carried away with quadratic equations and cult buzzwords, you might want to try a new product called WebPosition Agent (from I.S.T.; $99 to $289; 800-962-4855; www.webposition.com). The program monitors your site's ranking on all the top search engines, including AltaVista, Excite, and Yahoo.

Let's say you have a Web site that sells baseball cards. You can type in words like baseball, Babe Ruth, and Dodgers, and the WebPosition software will go out and bring you a detailed report of how your site fared on each engine. You can even set the program to automatically check your site's position--or your competitor's position--daily, weekly, or monthly.

If you discover that your site falls at the bottom of the engines' lists, don't despair. WebPosition Agent offers tips on how to boost your ranking. It might tell you, for example, to use the plural form of words on your site rather than the singular so that people searching under either form--say, card or cards--will pick it up. The folks at I.S.T. also send out a newsletter via E-mail with updates on the best ways to use search engines. --S.S.

Guru Watch

In their new book, Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities (Harvard Business School Press, March 1997, $24.95), John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong, consultants with McKinsey & Co., talk about why virtual communities are important to companies doing business on the Internet. Recently, Hagel discussed the topic with Inc. Technology.

On new business models: Many companies new to the Internet use the same formulas they depend on in the physical world. That may allow them to do things faster, but they miss the real opportunities, such as rethinking how they do business and redefining who their customers are. They should look at going on the Internet as they would look at going into a new country--and exploit the potential unique to the new place. The Motley Fool Financial Forum, an investment group on America Online, has done that well. The two brothers who started the group originally wanted to do a newsletter. But they found, on AOL, that the real power lay in drawing people together to interact and share information. They created an engaging environment by allowing people to discuss all kinds of investment strategies, rather than expecting them to read a static newsletter on-line.

On the benefits of being first: The organizations that are aggressive in building virtual communities first will be difficult to displace because they'll gain assets that are hard to duplicate or steal. For instance, they'll create a loyal membership and have access to its buying patterns and on-line habits. If they collect that information in an organized manner, they can use it to attract advertisers or to tailor their services and products to the group. Even if a competitor comes along later, it won't be able to reproduce those membership profiles. Nor will it be able to inspire the trust that has developed in the original communities.

On clarifying your intent: Those companies that are successful in attracting visitors to their on-line sites are those for whom selling is almost an afterthought. People go where they can get good information. For example, when Chase Manhattan realized that it was one of the largest lenders to recreational-vehicle owners, it set up a Web site that targets the RV market. At its site you can find links to other sites, one of which contains a listing of RV parks around the country and the facilities they offer. Of course, the blurring of advertising and information is a double-edged sword. Companies that put up sites like the Chase Manhattan one run the risk of looking dishonest. On the one hand, companies need to make the on-line experience engaging so that information won't seem dry and irrelevant. On the other hand, they have to make it clear when they're in a promotional or advertising mode.

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