[Our Paul Taylor appears as both number 2 and 3 in the (unpaid for) Google items -- only the dance company out ranks him.] Copyright 2005 The Financial Times Limited Financial Times (London, England) April 15, 2005 Friday London Edition 1 SECTION: BUSINESS LIFE SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY; Pg. 14 LENGTH: 975 words HEADLINE: Where to go to 'sell' your corporate profile BYLINE: By PAUL TAYLOR BODY: When did you last Google yourself? The results can be interesting and surprising, even with a super-common name like mine. When I tried it yesterday, Google returned 21.4m references to Paul Taylor(s) in just 0.11 seconds. I appeared 12th in a list headed by Paul Taylor, the New York-based choreographer, and including Paul Taylor, a published mathematician, and Paul D.Taylor, a palaeontologist at London's Natural History Museum. ---snip here--- It turns out that millions of people are searched for online every day, often out of curiosity, but sometimes by headhunters, would-be employers and colleagues as part of a kind of personal due diligence process. A recent poll conducted by Harris Interactive revealed that 23 per cent of people searched the web for the name of a business contact before meeting them and other research suggests many hiring managers research candidates online. General-purpose search engines such as Google can be used for this, particularly if the user is good at refining the search criteria. But they tend to be unfocused and deliver too much extraneous information. A whole new family of specialised search engines, personal profiling tools and associated services are emerging to cater to a growing market. I took a look at two US-based dedicated "people search" tools - Ziggs (www.ziggs.com), a Boston-based start-up that describes itself as an "online search platform for professionals", and Zoom Information (www.zoominfo.com), a five-year-old company formerly known as Eliyon Technologies. At one level both Ziggs and Zoom operate like online communities or contact networks such as LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), ZeroDegrees (www.zerodegrees.com) and Ryze (www.ryze.org). Recognising that selling yourself has become increasingly important, particularly in business, these online networking services allow users to create and edit their own online identities. But Ziggs and Zoom go much further in combining this with highly sophisticated search technology and summarisation techniques to build a profile of individuals or groups of individuals - for example, Microsoft employees - from public online sources. Since its launch a few months ago, Ziggs claims to have indexed almost 2.4m professionals spread over 43,000 companies. When you search for a particular someone with Ziggs, you will usually be pointed towards whatever biography page has been posted on his or her company's website. For example, a search for Michael Capellas correctly brought up four references to the MCI chief executive, three linking directly to the MCI website and his biography and the fourth linking to the Houston Indo-American Chamber of Commerce where he serves as an adviser. Like rival services, if you find you are not listed somewhere on the web, Ziggs allows you to create a free detailed personal profile that will show up whenever someone searches for your name. Creating a Ziggs profile is free, but for Dollars 50 a year Ziggs undertakes to buy online space with the big search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN, AoL and Ask Jeeves. That ensures that if someone searches for your name using one of these search tools, a prominent paid listing pops up with a link to your online profile. While I did not try this part of the service, I found the basic site easy to use and clearly laid out, although the database is clearly still a work in progress and many companies are still missing. Ziggs only delivers the information that individuals or companies want the researcher to see. It does not search out potentially negative information. Zoom Information, launched in 2002, takes a different approach that arguably produces more balanced results. ZoomInfo relies heavily on automated systems and advanced technology, sending software "spiders" out to crawl the web like other search engines, and using mathematical and linguistic formulas to analyse the text it finds. So far, ZoomInfo has compiled 25m complete personal profiles and 1.5m company summaries. The company says its spiders continually scan millions of websites, press releases, electronic news services, regulatory filings and other online sources. Then, it uses summarisation technology intelligently to compile a concise summary about a specific individual or company. Typically, individual summaries include past and present employers, positions, education and other business affiliations. The results of a search are displayed in a clean-looking Google-style window with advertising links running down a panel on the right. Users can log into the service and create a personal profile that is then combined with other web sources and listed as part of the results along with a tag line that reads "summary generated using information submitted by (the user) and 106 sources from the web". As well as its free service, Zoom also offers a subscription service that targets corporate users and is designed to help them streamline recruiting efforts, compile sales leads, enhance competitive intelligence efforts and more. Customers range from small companies to many Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft, Nike, Oracle, Pfizer and Time Warner. Subscribers to Zoom's "On Demand" service, which costs Dollars 99 for up to 30 summaries, can "Zoom-In" on colleagues, business partners, customers, potential employers, job candidates or even dates. You can search by a name, with or without a company, or search for lists of all employees of a specific company, alumni of a university or all the people ever mentioned on a particular website. This is a powerful tool, but the results of the free service are also impressive, if not foolproof. After adding my own profile my listing appeared sixth among the Paul Taylors found, but nevertheless highlighted a paper from a Salford University sociologist with the same name ahead of web references mainly to this weekly column. paul.taylor@ft.com 17-Apr-2005 09:08:04 -0300,7693;000000000000-0000000c