Business.com

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Business.com is a business-related Internet search engine and web directory. Business.com, Inc.is based in Santa Monica, California. It was founded in 1999 by Jake Winebaum (previously chairman of the Walt Disney Internet Group) and Sky Dayton (founder of Earthlink).

The Business.com search results are a combination of suggested categories, sponsored links from the Business.com directory, and text-matching webpages (from Google in 2006). The Business.com directory index, developed by a group of industry experts and library scientists, has contained more than 400,000 listings within about 65,000 industry, product, and service subcategories. ^[1]

The Business.com search results are preceded by 4 types of sponsored or paid links: "Suggested Categories" (from the business index); "Featured Listings" (highest ranked webpages); "Sponsored Links" (second-highest); and "Listings" which might not contain the actual search-text, but precede the list of actual text-matching webpages (if any allowed). The "Suggested Categories" include still other listings which are intended to be related to the search topic. Depending on the topic, a search might return only sponsored links, preventing search of general text-matching webpages. For example, a search for "lemon car" might return only paid or sponsored results for automobiles, lemon-law attorneys, vehicle history reports, etc. with no general search of the Internet.

In 2006, the Business.com webpages were branded with the Google image logo "Web Results powered by Google" (when the search-results included webpages from Google search). However, depending on the topic, some searches from Business.com (such as for "lemon car") never reached general Internet webpages.

The sale of the domain name "Business.com" achieved, at the time, a record domain-name sale at $7.5 million by Marc Ostrofsky to eCompanies.

LowerMyBills.com, sold in 2005 for $380 million, has been the largest success of Business.com to date.

In October, 2006, Business.com launched Work.com^[2], a site with business how-to guides contributed by the small business community.