The Daily Caveat recently posted about the re-branding of Eliyon.com as Zoominfo.com, a web-based search engine geared toward organizing and presenting information about business people. Eliyon.com's free search had been a very useful tool and was a regular part of my investigative search-path. SearchEngineWatch.com as a new article posted with a more thorough review of the new Zoominfo.com.

Here's a clip from Chris Sherman's new review:

Searching for People with ZoomInfo

By Chris Sherman, Associate Editor
March 31, 2005

ZoomInfo is a free service that's gathered information about more than 25 million people—including you, if you have even a minimal presence on the web.

Searching for information about people is one of the most common things people do on the web. Look at any of the query reporting services, such as Google's Zeitgeist, the Lycos 50 or the Yahoo Buzz Index, and the names of celebrities or notorious people invariably crowd the top the lists.

Searching for information about people you know, like friends, neighbors, ex-lovers (and admit it—yourself!) is such a common activity on Google that it has become a verb. Problem is, Googling someone who hasn't accumulated a lot of PageRank or other Google cred du jour is at best a crap shoot, with results that make it all but impossible to distinguish between John Doe and Jon Doh.

ZoomInfo was created specifically to help searchers locate accurate, reliable information about people. The service crawls the web much like others search engine, but focuses on information about people. Using a combination of artificial intelligence and natural language techniques, ZoomInfo connects information about individuals from disparate sources and gradually builds up online resumes that include employment information, educational background and other details.

It's a useful service, but not without flaws.

You can say that again. I don't know that I am quite as optimistic about the new product as Mr. Sherman. In my use of the new interface, I have found it to be much less responsive than in the previous incarnation as Eliyon.com. I have re-tried several names that produced hits in the past without any luck. One has to wonder where all that data went. And I am not exactly heartened by Zoominfo's plans to add "many more profiles of celebrities sometime this quarter." I full understand Zoominfo.com's desire to drive more traffic to the site, but one wonders whether attention devoted to celebrity profiles dilutes the site's appeal to its core user base (assuming that researchers are the most likely to be interested in paying for premium feaures).

But perhaps there's hope. According to the article, Zoominfo is planning on spinning off a new business-entity oriented information site and claims to have already cataloged more than 4.5 million businesses. It will be interesting to see how the information contained will compare with pre-existing sources such as Hoovers.com or soon-to-be-released products like Accoona.com's upcoming business data service.

-- MDT