ZoomInfo Shows Promise as People Finder
(Page 1 of 4 )
Niche search engines are becoming more common these days. Instead of going broad and shallow, they narrowly focus on one area and dig deep for information. Do they really offer better results than the major general search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!? Today we examine ZoomInfo, a niche search engine that serves jobhunters, recruiters, and anyone concerned with education and employment-related information about people.
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and a few others stand out as the search engines to use when hunting for any kind of general information on the Internet. Web search is a cutthroat field, and there doesn’t seem to be any more space at the top. What could these giants be leaving out that would give any other search engine some maneuvering room?
If you can’t go as broad as the general search engines, you can go narrow and deep. There is still room for search engines that specialize in one topic or field. For example, a search engine that focused on everything related to gardening could delight its users with the fact that a search on “apple” won’t return the name of a computer company. These are commonly referred to as niche search engines, and today we’ll be looking at one that specializes in people and business: ZoomInfo.
First I’ll give you a little historical background. ZoomInfo started an idea in CEO Jonathan Stern’s head in early 2000. At that time he was working for a company that makes hardware and software that scans business cards. He thought that if he could collect information about every company – what they do, what products they sell, who works there – it would be worth a lot of money. Thus was born the spin-off company that became ZoomInfo.
ZoomInfo is a search engine that finds information about people. It indexes corporate websites, press releases, electronic news services, SEC filings, and a variety of other online sources. From this information, ZoomInfo compiles a summary that covers a specific individual or company. Currently, the search engine has 27 million profiles of people and more than two million profiles of companies in its database.
While there are a number of interesting points about the search engine, two stand out for me: first, the information it compiles is all publicly available for free. That might go some way toward quelling privacy concerns (though it is unlikely to quash them completely). Second, to quote from ZoomInfo itself: “Every piece of ZoomInfo data is extracted and compiled by computer, with no human intervention.” That has a number of consequences, not all of them good.
Next: How it Works >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
