ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is a vertical search engine focused on people, companies, and the relationships between them. In addition to using the public web as its source to automatically create professionally-focused summaries of the people[1] and companies it finds, ZoomInfo has partnerships with Reunion.com[2] and XING[3] to provide additional data.
Overview
Zoom Information Inc. was founded by Jonathan Stern in 2000 as Eliyon Technologies. The company’s investors include Venrock Associates and Vulcan Capital.[4]
The site powers people searches for Amazon’s A9.com and Business Week. ZoomInfo also allows users to collaborate in the construction of its content by contributing information to their own summaries or building new ones where none exists. A count in April 2006 indicated upwards of 30 million summaries of business professionals and 2.5 million company profiles.[5]
The company draws around 4.5 million monthly users and generates circa $12 million in revenue from its fee-based and subscription services.[6]
Technology
Using natural language processing, ZoomInfo's crawlers read English sentences. It then extracts relevant pieces of information about people, such as the companies they work for and their job titles.
Once ZoomInfo extracts requested data, information integration logic then sifts through and organizes the data. Biographies of people found on various Web pages are assembled into summaries.
Competition
Zoominfo's competitors are sites such as Jigsaw, implu, InsideView, Hoovers and InfoUSA.
References
- ^ About.com: Web Search
- ^ Reunion Partners with ZoomInfo for People Search - Mashable August 20, 2007
- ^ Xing, ZoomInfo Partner - WebPro June 14, 2007
- ^ ZoomInfo investors
- ^ ZoomInfo technology overview
- ^ ZoomInfo expands into Web search for businesses - Reuters April 2, 2007