Inter-Alia.com had a quick post this morning on a few new web search tools that have come on line recently. One mentioned that is of particular interest to The Daily Caveat is Ziggs.com, which is in Beta mode for the time being. Like Zoominfo.com (which has been discussed here previously) Ziggs.com focuses on name and affiliation based searching to locate profiles of business professionals.

Also like Zoominfo.com, Ziggs.com allows users to upload their own profile information to beef up the database and Ziggs claims to house over two million profiles from business people at over 40,000 companies (Zoominfo's claim is 25 million execs).

Unfortunately, unlike Zoominfo, Ziggs does not appear to combine these manually entered bios with on-the-fly profiles constructed via web crawl. For example, Ziggs doesn't know who Bill Gates is (you know, the Microsoft guy). Zoominfo, on the other hand, has a pretty good idea.

Reviewing the scant literature available on the site, it appears that Zigg's is really a marketing tool masquerading slightly as a search function. Most of their promotional data focuses on marketing and how they can help you and your compamy raise your web profile. Their search does not appear to extend beyond the personal biographical data entered by site visitors.

In their own words:

The Ziggs Index includes public profiles of user-generated content already available on the Web today. It includes corporate profiles that companies have submitted to Ziggs for inclusion, leveraging their investment in existing profiles on their own website. And equally important, the Ziggs Index includes professional profiles created by individuals like you.

Not a bad start, but seemingly not yet competetive with other similar tools available in the marketplace and not yet something the serious researcher should turn to.

Full Disclosure:

After writing (and somewhat critically I might add) about Zoominfo.com's transition from Eliyon.com to its current format, I was contact by Zoominfo.com's communications department and offered a "guest account" trial subscription to their services. I have not, as yet, taken them up on the test drive. At some point I probably will and you will read about it here.

-- MDT

Labels: database