Press Releases

ZoomInfo Patents Computer Method and Apparatus for Collecting People and Organization Information

First Summarization Search Engine

February 6, 2006 - Waltham, Mass. - Zoom Information, Inc., (www.zoominfo.com) the search engine for discovering people, companies and relationships, has been awarded its third patent. The new patent (United States Patent 6,983,282) protects a computer method and apparatus for collecting people and organization information from Web sites. ZoomInfo's patented summarization search engine has built the world's largest database of business people information including 29 million summaries of business people and two million company summaries.

"ZoomInfo has automated the process of reading and understanding what to other search engines is just random text on pages. ZoomInfo then creates new content and delivers more highly relevant search results," said Jeremy Rothman-Shore, vice president of R&D at Zoom Information Inc. "ZoomInfo's new patent recognizes the difference between our Summarization Search and traditional search engines, and defends our groundbreaking progress against competition."

Searching for, reading and retrieving people and company information from Web sites has traditionally been accomplished using human editors. A word can have different meanings depending on the context. For example, a person might interpret the entity "Columbia" as either a university or a river, depending on whether they were reading an article on cost of higher learning or pollution in bodies of water.

ZoomInfo accesses a potential Web site of interest and determines what type of site it is and develops a site-specific plan for information extraction. Internal links are explored, and news pages, press releases, etc., are mined for people and company information.

"Summarizing information is incredibly difficult with huge amounts of information," said Jonathan Stern, CEO of and founder of Zoom Information Inc. "We're the first to accomplish this at the scale of the Web, and this capability is our platform for even more significant advancements in search."

About ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is re-defining how businesspeople connect with opportunities that drive business growth. Founded in 2000, ZoomInfo is the only business information provider with continuously updated, multi-sourced, highly relevant business information and unrivalled tools to quickly pinpoint contacts and accelerate success. Built on proprietary and patented Web crawling and community-contributed content — with intelligent matching and profile-creating technologies — the ZoomInfo™ Database currently spans 5 million businesses and 50 million employees. It is at the heart of all ZoomInfo applications including: ZoomInfo™ Directory, its popular free website where businesspeople manage their own profiles and search for companies and employees; ZoomInfo™ Pro, the company's flagship software-as-a-service offering, providing the most advanced searching capabilities on the market; and ZoomInfo™ Enterprise Solutions, which include customized data and integration with customer software applications.

ZoomInfo serves millions of businesspeople from start-ups to blue-chip companies (including leading brands such as Amazon, Microsoft, Time Warner, Wal-Mart, Yahoo! and the top U.S. recruiting firms), For more information, go to www.zoominfo.com or call (866) 904-9666. Follow ZoomInfo on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the "Follow the Lead" blog (followthelead.zoominfo.com).

For Additional Information Contact:
Jani Spede
Jani Spede Public Relations, LLC
jspede@spedepr.com
(866) 923-9980