Zibb Zips In With B2B Search

The electronics and construction industries in particular should find the business to business search concept of Zibb.com useful, as Reed Business’ RB Search division delivers its first product.

Vertical search has been espoused in our pages and elsewhere as a likely strong growth section of the search industry. Publisher Reed Business, part of the massive Reed Elsevier Group, has been backing the development of Zibb for its initial step into search.

Having a significant history of distributing B2B information to industry professionals looks like it’s served well in Zibb’s development. After dropping in on Zibb’s front page, one can search from all of the resources available to Zibb, or narrow the search down to News, Products, Suppliers, or Web & Blogs.

A variety of industry categories appear on the main page, and clicking one takes the visitor to a page that brings together information related to that industry. At press time, news stories about Juniper and NEC’s partnership on FMC, and a possible deal for ARRIS to buy Concurrent Computer appeared atop the electronics listings.

More general news aggregators just aren’t going to put those stories in front of the majority of their leaders. At Zibb, the electronics page is just the start; visitors can navigate to more specific topics like Design Issues & Characteristics.

Searching for ‘capacitor’ brought out plenty of results for each of the main search options. News delivered articles from EDN.com and CMP Media’s Industrial Control Design Line as top results. The Web & Blogs option provided alternative search suggestions and the ability to further filter results by industry.

Results for Products and Suppliers come from Kellysearch, also under the Reed Business umbrella. Those results include general and brand name options for Products, and an alphabetical company listing under Suppliers.

I think B2B customers would benefit if RB Search makes an option to filter by country in the Suppliers tab available in future versions of Zibb. And like so many sites today, Zibb uses Google’s AdSense as a monetization option; I won’t be surprised to see this replaced with a Reed Business-operated advertising option in a future release.

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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.