Ask HN: How do you research your competition?

Knowing your competition is a very important part of business and I'm curious to get your input as to how you figure out who your direct and indirect competition is.

I recently needed to do a specific task and while there were a couple of solutions out there, I really disliked their implementations (basically they were too difficult to use). I think I can do a much better job in implementing the idea (which I am working on now), but I'd really like to have a better picture of who's out there doing the same thing.

Do you have any suggestions for finding potential competitors aside from just mindlessly Googling words and phrases?

Thanks in advance!