Zoom Information, Inc., a 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 a database of business people information including 29 million summaries of business people and two million company summaries.

The new patent covers ZoomInfo's technology that automatically replicates the human editorial process of interpreting information based on context, then summarizing the total of data collected across the Web about each entity. ZoomInfo accesses a potential Web site of interest and determines what type of site it is and develops a plan for information extraction based on the type of Web site and content of the documents. Internal links are explored, and news pages, press releases, etc., are mined for people and company information that is then returned to a database. ZoomInfo determines how frequently to revisit the site based on the type of site and information found.

(www.zoominfo.com)