"Ziggs, based in Boston, is technically in beta, or prerelease, status. But it is open for business to all Web users. It claims to be indexing about 2.3 million Web sites, and to include people who work at nearly 43,000 companies. When you locate a person with Ziggs, you mainly get whatever biography page has been posted about that person on his or her company's Web site. If you aren't listed somewhere on the Web, Ziggs allows you to create a detailed profile that will pop up whenever anyone searches for your name, or for other characteristics that match your profile. You can even include a photo, a favorite quotation and a canned 'interview' based on questions Ziggs supplies. Ziggs is free for searchers. There will be a $25 annual fee to be listed in Ziggs, though it's free for the first year. For $50 a year, Ziggs will also buy an ad on the big search sites like Google designed to make your name pop up in the paid listings that run alongside search results."
[WSJ / Mossberg]
Lots of buzz these days around vertical search (jobs, travel, business, ecommerce, shopping etc.) , and in particular, peoplesearch. Another interesting people search company Zoominfo, formerly Eliyon (backed by Venrock) has partnered with Lycos in their people search offering. It will be interesting to see when Google will enter the space and which partner they will go with, if any. Yahoo has a people search page but it is white pages only and the datum isn't all that relevant. Other directory/people finding services include: switchboard.com, whitepages.com, bigfoot, peoplefinders.
3 comments:
Ziggs is also a great way to give yourself a free online presence - an online personal brand - using their free profile creation tools. To create a profile at Ziggs or list your existing company bio at Ziggs is free. It's free to search and free to be listed (no longer $25/year - the company did away with that pricing model as of May 2nd.)
Zoominfo is based on next-generation search technology that automatically crawls and summarizes ALL the information it finds on 25 million people across the web, even caching historical information. Anyone who understands this stuff will know the technology is pretty sophisticated. Ziggs in comparison, relies mainly on old-fashioned manual editorial, gathering information from company bio pages which is why it is much more limited in scope. There's not much comparison between the two from a technology viewpoint. Zoominfo has also solved the issue of monetization and reports several quarters of profitable growth, a task which Ziggs and other social network solutions are struggling with as they eat up their funding runway.
Seems like Google can get into the people search space rather quickly. Who do you think would likely acquire a ZoomInfo since they do not seem to be a stand alone company in the future
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