(MONEY Magazine) – When it comes to value investing, Warren Buffett is the big kahuna. This 66-year-old investor's prowess at finding companies selling below what he calls their intrinsic value (essentially what a savvy buyer would pay for the entire company) has showered shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway Corp. with annual gains of 32% since 1980, vs. 16% for Standard & Poor's 500.

Of course, as a living Wall Street legend, Buffett has sources of information you will never have. But guess what? You have an advantage over him--namely, access to the World Wide Web. You see, Warren doesn't use a computer to pick stocks. In this column, I'll show you where on the Internet you can unearth the kind of undervalued stocks that Warren himself would love. And I'll share with you the fruits of my own Buffett-inspired surfing.

To become a virtual Buffett, you need two things: current data on a reasonably large sample of stocks and a screening mechanism robust enough to winnow down your choices to the relatively few businesses that would attract the master's attention. What Buffett likes are consistently profitable big companies with relatively little debt and share prices that haven't been bid up into the stratosphere. The best CD-ROM software like Morningstar's Stock Tools and Value Line's Investment Survey for Windows lets you screen up to 8,000 companies on as many as 220 criteria. And both services refresh their data frequently. Morningstar sends monthly CD-ROM updates via mail, for example, while Value Line subscribers can download new statistics weekly off the company's Website. Such timeliness is costly, though. Value Line charges $995 a year for its CD-ROM package with weekly data, while Morningstar's service costs $675 for monthly updates, $375 if you can settle for quarterly stats.

Most Websites, meanwhile, suffer from the opposite problem. Many are free, but their screening tools are rarely discriminating enough to mimic the Buffet touch. For example, Thomson MarketEdge (http://www.marketedge.com; $9.95 a month; the site takes a new name, Thomson Investors Network, and address, www.thomsoninvest.net, as of June 1) maintains a huge database of 7,000 publicly traded companies, but its 17 screening criteria don't let you eliminate companies whose earnings have been erratic over the past few years. Similarly, Research Magazine (www.researchmag.com; free) provides insightful industry and company profiles and has 10,000 stocks in its database. Its Portfolio Analysis page also lets you calculate the returns on any stock in its database for the past 12 months--and even shows you how much you would have today had you invested $10,000 in a particular stock five years ago. But you can't screen for Buffett-like qualities such as price/book ratios (the stock price divided by the firm's assets per share, after subtracting liabilities).

And while Zack's Investment Research (www.zacks.com; $150 a year) is terrific at summarizing Wall Street opinion and securities analysts' five-year earnings estimates for 6,000 companies, its 81-field screening tool isn't much help for digging up companies trading below their true worth. But that figures: Buffett never pays much attention to Wall Street opinion.

If Warren were a Nethead, however, even he would love MarketPlayer (www.marketplayer.com). This site covers somewhat fewer companies than its competition--3,900--but its very precise screening engine lets you target exactly the traits you want. For example, to identify shares selling at low prices relative to the company's assets, I searched for stocks with a price-to-book-value ratio of less than 4, which is roughly the average for the S&P 500. To home in on shares trading at bargain prices based on their earnings power, I screened for stocks whose price/earnings ratios compared with the market are at the low end of their historic range. These two cuts--both touchstones of classic value investing--yielded a list of 1,464 companies.

I then asked the Website to apply other Buffett-like filters. I targeted only large companies (those with stock market value of at least $2 billion) that are profitable (estimated returns on equity of at least 20% for the next 12 months), rock solid (ranked within the top 10% of companies for consistent earnings growth) and have little debt (long-term borrowing equal to less than 40% of total capital).

I now had a manageable list of six potentially undervalued blue chips: $15 billion (estimated '97 sales) grocery store chain Albertson's; $16 billion computer services giant Electronic Data Systems; $6 billion auto-parts distributor Genuine Parts; $4 billion salt and chemical conglomerate Morton International; $1 billion Pall, a maker of filters that, among other things, are used to treat donated blood; and $4 billion mail-room equipment maker Pitney Bowes.

But a question still nagged at me: "Would Buffett bite for any of these?" I pressed on with more research.

First, I revisited Research Magazine's Portfolio Analysis page and typed in the ticker symbols of the six stocks. Pall's stock was down 19% over the past 12 months and returned a meager 5.7% a year since 1992--not exactly a vote of confidence in the company's management. I gave Pall the boot.

Then I backtracked to Zack's site and read the company reports and investment pros' opinions on my remaining five choices. Analysts are forecasting that Albertson's profit margin will shrink from 3.69% to 3.58% this year and that its annual earnings growth rate of 13% over the next five years will lag the average of other supermarket chains by 1.5 percentage points. Adios, Albertson's. The profit picture at Pitney Bowes and Genuine Parts looks even worse, as stock researchers predict both companies will lag their industries' earnings growth rates by five percentage points or more annually over the next five years. So I cut them loose too.

That left me with Morton and EDS, both of which possess the kind of qualities Buffett demands, such as strong managements with proven track records. Morton has seen its stock price double in the past five years. And this year, analysts project that EDS will increase profits 13%, vs. 9% for the S&P. Another of Warren's rules is that he doesn't buy a company if he can't comprehend what it does. This duo meets that test too. Morton is North America's largest maker and seller of salt; you don't get much more basic than that. And while EDS does have a technology component, its business isn't very complicated: The company provides data processing services and solves technology problems for companies that don't want to grapple with such issues themselves. EDS is also trading at a price/earnings ratio 26% below the market average, while analysts project that its earnings will grow 15.2% in the next five years, or more than twice as fast as the market overall.

I don't know, unfortunately, what Warren thinks about these stocks--or if he's considered them at all. He wouldn't return my calls, and a Web search didn't turn up an e-mail address for him. But if EDS and Morton turn up in future Berkshire Hathaway annual reports, don't complain that you hadn't heard about these stocks before the big kahuna jumped aboard.