Blank (Media) Slate

According to their press, ZoomInfo is taking the path toward semantic search by utilizing their patented technologies to pre-scrub crawled data. This approach, rather than relying on adding linguistic magic at query time, allows them the flexibility to massage the crawled data into searchable indexes. In this way, it then looks like the information is retrieved by a user’s more typical keyword searches.

When searching for themselves using their engine, they say:

ZoomInfo is the best destination for information about people and companies. Our product is a summarization search engine that finds, understands, extracts and summarizes information about people and companies on the Web.

And for a deeper dive, here’re a couple notes from their technology page (annotated):

ZoomInfo employs Artificial Intelligence Algorithms to analyze Website pages and to create a human like understanding of their content. With these algorithms, ZoomInfo analyzes the type of Website and the content of the Website based on how it’s constructed. ZoomInfo is able to deduce that a specific paragraph is a company description or that a specific address contains the location of a company’s headquarters to extract the most accurate and relevant information.

ZoomInfo’s semantic search engine continually crawls the Web and reads business information. Using proprietary Natural Language Extraction technology, ZoomInfo analyzes sentences to understand their meaning and to extract relevant information about companies, and people, such as the industry a company is in and its products or services, or the company a person works for and his/her job title.

That certainly sounds kewl. But what about the reality? Check out this recent ZDNet post (annotated):

A search by company for IBM turns up some basic information, and lists Ramon Demper as the company CEO and CTO. As far as I know Sam Palmisano is the IBM CEO and Demper left IBM in 1993. A search for ZDNet in both basic and powersearch (requires registration) and by company and people turned up outdated and grossly incorrect information. Similarly, a search on CNET turned up a lot of erroneous information.

And if you consider using it as a consumer to find a “security software” company:

Searching for security software companies in California with $50 million or less in revenue and fewer than 100 employees turned up Network Associates, which merged with McAfee in 2002, as the first entry.

I’m assuming they’re still working out the kinks in their system. The problem I see, though, is they appear to be relying too heavily on their smart software without a human in the loop. If they’re hoping to court the business community with subscription services, I’d think they’d need to significantly increase their accuracy rate.

While it’s currently hip to be wrong (and opening the doors to social networking style corrections), that doesn’t seem to be what their doing.