Amazon’s A9.com search engine now lets you be a giant gossipy snoop. Zoom Information Inc., a search engine engineered to collect information on people and offer automatic summaries about them is now the default source of people information on A9.com.
People looking for background information on a new acquaintance, business partner, neighbor or vendor can select the “People” box on the A9.com homepage to return summaries that describe the person’s work history, education and accomplishments. The engine crawls Internet sources to find and summarize sources about specific individuals into “concise, stand-alone documents.” So far over 27 million summaries have been built.
A summary of George W. Bush complete with the infamous Google results for “failure” are there. And interestingly enough, Hillary Clinton returns photos of her choking down a hot dog (taken from a weird biography on Rotten.com) or even Hillary angry just out of the shower.
The summaries aren’t absolute however. Users can register with ZoomInfo to monitor and mange their online presence by editing and adding to their summaries to ensure that the search results are the best reflection of the person’s accomplishments.
“A Web search for my name, Jonathan Stern, can return literally millions of results,” said Zoom Information’s CEO Jonathan Stern, “whereas ZoomInfo brings back around 100 summaries of the 100 different Jonathan Sterns that are out there – that’s a significant efficiency gain that A9.com users searching for people information can now leverage.”
Amazon owned and Google powered, A9.com also searches the Web, books, images, blogs, Wikipedia, and the Yellow Pages.
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