New People Search Engine - Zoom Info

I'm always interested in networking sites, especially those with good people search engines. Since I've been on the Internet a very long time (pre-WWW was even invented) I have a very long trail of posts, press articles, and teenage writings from years and years ago.

As I've written before, finding people is not difficult if they have contributed to facebook, MySpace, etc. and there will definitely be a problem in 10 years where people want to remove their facebook pages after they have grown out of their teenage years. See my article on this previously.

For those who are in my generation (I'm 33 years old), many never were as adventurous and so finding people becomes a big more difficult, but not impossible. Almost everyone has some kind of Internet presence. Its a matter of digging in the right places to track it down.

A new tool called ZoomInfo helps in this regard. Type in any name and it will find many old press references for that name. What's smart about it is that it seems to be good at parsing out references to relationships between people, companies and other colleagues. It also seems to be able to collate references together into a profile, e.g. it can recognize the same press article in multiple places and summarize them together.

If you look up yourself and find your own profile, you can claim your profile either by verifying against your credit card. They don't charge the card, they just use it to authenticate your name.