ZoomInfo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ZoomInfo is a vertical search engine focused on people, companies, and the relationships between them. It uses the public web as its source to automatically create professionally-focused summaries of the people and companies it finds. The site powers people search 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 exist. Current count is 30 million summaries of business professionals and 2.5 million company profiles as of April 2006.
Zoom Information Inc. was founded by Jonathan Stern in 2000 as Eliyon Technologies. The company’s investors include Venrock Associates, Vulcan Capital, and others.
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[edit] Technology
Using natural language processing, ZoomInfo crawlers read English sentences ("Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computer with...") and understand what they mean. ZoomInfo then extracts relevant pieces of information about people, such as the companies they work for and their job titles.
Artificial intelligence algorithms allow ZoomInfo to analyze a Web site and extract information based on an understanding of how the Web site is constructed. The technology can deduce that a specific paragraph describes a company, or that a specific address contains the location of a company headquarters.
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, and inconsistencies in the information are interpreted and resolved.
