ZoomInfo Offers Free Company Profiles

Apr 2, 2007 at 12:45pm ET by Chris Sherman

ZoomInfo today launched its Business Information Search Engine, a service that offers information on more than 3.5 million companies. Although the company profiles are similar to those offered by Hoovers.com and other subscription-based providers, ZoomInfo business profiles are free.

The profiles also differ in how they’re compiled. While most business information providers laboriously compile information by hand, ZoomInfo has developed a semantic search engine that crawls the web and semantically tags, aggregates and organizes information automatically for each company it tracks.

Typical profiles, such as this one of Microsoft, offers descriptions, M&A activities, their revenues, key employees, competitors and current job openings. Through a partnership with Indeed.com, current job openings at the company are also displayed.

You can search for companies by name, product category, industry, market niche, revenues and so on. You can also search for specific people by name, with results coming from ZoomInfo’s 35 million individual profiles that I’ve written about elsewhere.

You can also search for people within companies through ZoomInfo’s premium ZoomExec service, available for a $99 monthly subscription fee.

Chris Sherman is Executive Editor of SearchEngineLand.com and President of Searchwise LLC, a Boulder Colorado based Web consulting firm. He also programs and co-chairs the Search Marketing Expo - SMX conference series.

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3 COMMENTS ON ZoomInfo Offers Free Company Profiles

gary price, April 3rd, 2007 at 1:45 am ET:

Hey Chris:
While the official launch was yesterday, ZoomInfo’s business listings have been online since last June.

http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/06/27/the-zoom-list-beta-an-autonomously-built-directory-of-companies-products-and-services-from-zoominfo/
originally named TheZoomList (now TheZoomList redirects to ZoomInfo.

Perhaps most useful is the ability to browse by industry at this URL:
http://www.zoominfo.com/Industries/default.aspx

KellyInfo, part of Reed Business, offers info for about 2 million companies, globally.
http://www.kellysearch.com/
It’s also part of their Zibb service.
http://www.zibb.com
The same for ThomasNet.
http://www.thomasnet.com/
I would place both of these on the virtual B2B shelf.

Speaking of semantic search two new resources of note.

1) New products from Cognition (several demos)
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2007/04/03/cognition-launches-new-linguistic-search-engine/

2) 4 New “Entity” Engines
Interesting stuff here.
Finding and Searching for Entities with TextMap, TextMed, TextBlg, and TextBiz.
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2007/03/26/finding-and-searching-for-entities-with-textmap-textmed-textblg-and-textbiz/

What is text map:
“TextMap tracks references to people, places, and things appearing in news text, so as to identify meaningful relationships between them. TextMap monitors the state of the world by analyzing both the temporal and spatial distribution of these entities. We currently analyze over 1000 domestic and international news sources every day.”

TextMap has been around for 10 months but in the last couple of weeks added a bunch of new features.

Cheers,
gary

P.S. Fee-based CorpTech
http://www.corptech.com
offers excellent company (info tech biz) company and personnel profiles. They do offer a one day free trial to the entire database.

360view4u, August 15th, 2007 at 10:04 am ET:

Bingo – Time has come for subscription based content providers to review their business model.

360view4u, August 15th, 2007 at 10:05 am ET:

Bingo – Time has come for subscription based content providers to review their business model. – There are quite a few providers , who are offering reasonably well free information service… like

http://www.360view4u.co.uk
http://www.freemarketresearch.co.uk

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