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European business networking site XING and U.S. business search service ZoomInfo are introducing a way to bring their two continents’ worth of business contacts together to challenge rival LinkedIn as well as more general social networks like Facebook.

Starting tomorrow, XING members will be able to search for and befriend more than 18 million business professionals who have registered profiles on ZoomInfo and search a total pool of 40 million profiles (including unregistered ZoomInfo profiles) who don’t use XING. With this search option, the two companies are hoping to spur more social interaction. Search results will include people’s career history and professional highlights. Seeing this information about somebody may give you more reason to want to friend them within XING.

XING is small in the U.S. but popular in Europe and claims four million total users worldwide. ZoomInfo is not really a social network, as it scrapes web pages for information about the people in its database rather than relying on friend requests. Because it gathers information about businesspeople with or without their permission, it’s been more useful for recruiters than for professional interaction.

The new search offering is the second step in the two companies’ effort to present an international alternative to big business networking site, LinkedIn. The companies announced their partnership, including this search feature, last June (our coverage). The first step came in September, when ZoomInfo introduced a co-registration option so that people could register simultaneously for both its site and XING. ZoomInfo also introduced a public application programming interface for developers at that time, so other developers can create applications within its platform (our coverage).

Hamburg, Germany-based Xing, which went public last year, Waltham, Mass.-based ZoomInfo, and LinkedIn are also no doubt concerned that businesspeople are using more general social networks like Facebook for business networking. Anecdotally, I’m finding that Facebook is just as useful for business networking.

Linkedin, last I heard, has more than 16 million total registered users and says it is growing by around a million registered users a month. Facebook has more than 61 million monthly active users, although it’s not clear what portion of those people are using Facebook for business.

updated
ZoomInfo, a site that compiles information about your personal profile — whether you like it or not — is supplying that information to other sites and advertisers so they can target you while you surf the Web.

The new advertising network offering is significant because it comes at a time when Facebook is unleashing a advertising platform that it says makes targeting even more precise. However, ZoomInfo’s may be more controversial, because of the reams of personal information it has about you.

ZoomInfo, based in Waltham, Mass, has detailed personal information for almost 40 million business professionals. It gets the information by scouring the Web, gathering things such as your name, past work affiliation, and even your email address if it can find it. It tracks the industry you work in, your company, title, functional area, education, sex and location.

Going forward, this is an example of how ZoomInfo’s network, due to go live next year, will work: Say you register at Dell’s web site, to buy a computer, and provide that company with your name and email address. Dell can then draw much more information about you from ZoomInfo – and serve up advertising that can target you much more effectively.

Here’s the catch: ZoomInfo can only do this if the user has visited ZoomInfo before. Because ZoomInfo needs to place a cookies on their browser. That way they ZoomInfo can exchange information about that person with Dell, which also drops a cookie on the person. This why, they can both maintain that they’re not personally identifying individuals with their advertising campaigns (the person’s information is not traded according to their name, but by cookie), even if the effect is practically the same.

ZoomInfo can use its cookie to track the individual across other sites too.

By the way, if you haven’t already picked up a ZoomInfo cookie, you’re increasingly likely to do so. If you’re like me, you find yourself landing at ZoomInfo’s profile pages from time to time, directed there by Google after you search for someone.

ZoomInfo calls its information “bizographic,” because it is biographic data related to business identity. The company says its data is much more useful to advertisers than say, Facebook’s targeting information, because its more precise.

An advertiser of a platinum credit card offer, for example, could use ZoomInfo’s information to target only CEOs and directors of IT.

Bryan Burdick, COO said Facebook was smart to launch a targeted advertising program to be unveiled this week. “We’re excited about what Facebook is doing, it’s validating what we’ve believed all along,” he said. “This is the next wave in advertising. Contextually placed ads don’t cut it anymore,” he said, referring to the ads supplied by companies like Google, which simply look at the words within a Web page and serve up an ad that is related to those words, but knowing nothing about the reader.

However, Burdick says Facebook risks upsetting its members, who signed up with certain expectations, for example about not having their data and activities presented to advertisers. Facebook, for example, is expected to let advertisers target users with say, dog food ads, if they user owns a dog and show that they are dog lovers. A big problem is that few people are active enough to update profiles regularly. Information or interests that users expressed two years ago may not longer apply to them even if it is still on their profile page.

Paul Martino, a co-founder of one of the early social network companies, Tribe, and founder of advertising company Aggregate Knowledge says this will limit Facebook’s success at ad targeting. Outdated profiles have been a major problem for every social network. People would get married, but the system was still targeting the fact that you were single. Another challenge is accurately divining peoples’ interests from their profile pages. Tribe tried advertising by targeting people’s profiles, but it “went poorly,” he said. Ad targeting a profile based on stated interests or words may sound easy, but it carries a conceptual flaw, Martino said. The aren’t a good way to match ads, he said. “That’s not going to work. I promise you that..I was surprised at how bad ad targeting was.” He said few people have realized how poor such targeting is because only a few players, such as Tribe and LinkedIn have actually had the profile information to target against. “Its one of those things, I think you almost have the scars on your back,” he said.

ZoomInfo updates about 3 million profiles a night, so at least its profile information is updated.

It’s also trying to avoid an association with “spooky” targeting. It insists it doesn’t personally identify you. In the Dell example above, Dell already had your name and address, and ZoomInfo provides Dell with much more personal information about you based on the cookie information.

ZoomInfo collects its data about you whether or not you “register” with that site. The company says that about 100,000 people a week are finding their profiles on ZoomInfo and then clicking on a button to confirm that the profile is about them and otherwise correct (ZoomInfo allows people to edit their profiles).

The company says it is ahead of Facebook’s ad network plans. ZoomInfo has already started building a network of sties and partners that will be able to use its information to target readers, Burdick said.

The closest competitors to ZoomInfo’s ad network are the behavioral networks such as Tacoda and Revenue Science. Those companies don’t offer biographical information, however. LinkedIn, a networking site for professionals, has so far remained critical of ZoomInfo’s moves to comb the Web for names and emails, without getting users’ permission.

For years, technology to search for people has been neglected, compared to most parts of the Web. Until now, that is.

A wave of new entrants are making it much easier to find out everything about a person, from their job, to their personalities, their age and even where they live. Forget the privacy implications, the race is on.

LinkedIn, a social network for professionals, had the field to itself a few years ago. Sites like Friendster let you search for friends, but it wasn’t ordered for full-on people search.

Only over the past year or so has there been a frantic rush to offer more sophisticated people search. Facebook, for example, has emerged into a networking tool, and increasingly a place where people search for each other. Here’s the latest string of developments:

–ZoomInfo, one of the largest contacts site that lets you search a database of people and company profiles, will announce next Wednesday it will open to let developers build create applications on its platform. ZoomInfo is one of the more mature people search sites, but for while had remained relatively closed. The public API can be found here, http://developer.zoominfo.com (this will work next week) with more documentation. ZoomInfo has already worked with Amazon A9, Compete and Xing on this. For example, take a look at Compete’s profile on CNET, and you’ll see that it carries a widget on the right with more information provided by ZoomInfo.

– ZoomInfo now lets you look up full profiles at its site, and through widgets via its API; it merely limits the number of searches you can do on people. You have to pay to search high numbers of people, and to search by certain sub-category of occupation, for example. Related: ZoomInfo and a business networking site, Xing, announced a partnership to integrate their services in June, and there’s news next week on that front too. Xing adds the networking features that ZoomInfo hadn’t had until now.

– Viadeo, is a French-based company that lets you add a profile and then search for contacts according to industry they work in, or any other number of variables. It also lets you search for jobs. We registered, tried it out and found it functional. Each person tags themselves according to subjects they’re interested in, and people can get in touch with each other. The company is similar to LinkedIn. It just raised €5 million in funding (see Mashable) from its existing backers AGF Private Equity and Ventech. It has more than 1.3 million members. It now operates in several European countries, and is expanding into Chinese via a partnership with Tianji, a Chinese social network. (screenshot at bottom)

– Yahoo China has just released a new version of its search, Yahoo.cn, that includes a people search, though it’s focused on celebrities. Yahoo uses information extraction technology and semantic analysis to create a Flash-based map of relationships, along with explanations of why they are related to and the sources of the information. China Web 2.0 provides an example of Jack Ma. Another Chinese company, Koowo, reportedly got $5.5 million for among other things, a similar mapping of Chinese stars. However, the downside is that these offerings often appear to be inaccurate. Finally, there’s Ucloo, the Chinese people search, that last we heard was looking to raise a round of capital.

– Spock, the Silicon Valley start-up focused on people search, got off to a good start mid last month, when it hit the list of fastest growing sites, according to Alexa, even if it had some well-reported snafus (Spock lets users tag other people in profiles with words to describe them, and some people have complained about being tagged with insulting words). It joins Wink, another Silicon Valley company focused on people search.

–And this just in: There’s a new company called PeekYou. However, it looks considerably more lightweight, compared to Spock and others, perhaps because it has just launched, with less preparation than the others (Techcrunch has more).

(Updated with initial LinkedIn response)

Xing, the Hamburg, Germany social networking site for business contacts, has just signed a deal that makes its network larger than it U.S. competitor LinkedIn.

It has announced a partnership with ZoomInfo, the largest fact-checked proprietary database in the world, of some 36 million business profiles. Xing’s two million members will now be able to search and access basic information on those profiles for free, effectively giving Xing much wider reach than LinkedIn’s 11 million members. The paperwork was signed in New York this morning, and we just got off the phone with Lars Hinrichs, Xing’s chief executive.

Xing has been putting pressure of LinkedIn for some time, having recently gone public and expanding aggressively in Europe. The accord is significant because ZoomInfo’s profiles are largely for executives in the English-speaking world, where Xing has been weak to date. [Update: However, LinkedIn has responded, saying ZoomInfo has scraped contact and other information about people without their permission, and Xing will now have to deal with privacy issues. More below.]

ZoomInfo’s profile search is the gold standard for the headhunter industry, but so far it has not been accessible without a paid membership and it has few social networking features. However, under the terms, Xing members still have to upgrade to a premium account of $5 a month in order to contact ZoomInfo people they aren’t already networked with, or to change their profiles on ZoomInfo. This is not unlike LinkedIn’s requirement that people pay for a premium membership to directly contact people not already in their network.

While Xing specializes in social networking, ZoomInfo’s value is in crawling the web, performing semantic analysis of Web pages about people, and extracting information about them to add to its database of profiles. A paying member of Xing will get full access to this information under the deal, however will not have access to most sophisticated search abilities offered by ZoomInfo. For example, while a Xing member will be able to search for a name of an IBM executive on ZoomInfo, they will not be able to search for all executives at IBM at C level. ZoomInfo effectively becomes a tool for headhunters, while Xing becomes useful for most other people.

Additionally, ZoomInfo will be launching a marketing campaign, driving its members to sign up with Xing, Hinrichs said. ZoomInfo’s 4.5 million unique monthly visitors will be able to join Xing’s network directly with a two-click process. ZoomInfo makes money from the deal from a revenue share agreement the two companies have signed.

Contact information of Xing users will continue to be protected within Xing, Hinrichs said.

We’ve sought comment from LinkedIn, and will update as necessary. [Update: LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman is in transit, but did provide an initial response by email. He said "Zoominfo has scraped 36 million profiles (with lots of duplicates) and used datamining to figure out email addresses. Essentially, what this deal does, is allow Xing's users to send email or call without permission of the people that Zoominfo has scraped...I'm not sure that this is something to crow about."]

[Update II: Predictably, Bryan Burdick, COO of ZoomInfo, has responded to Hoffman's criticism. He said ZoomInfo searches for information publicly available on the Web, and simply tags and organizes it so that is more useful for searchers. ZoomInfo doesn't look behind firefalls or bot stoppers, and doesn't license any information from third-parties. "We're like Google," he said. In other words, if your contact information is out there, say on your corporate Web site, it will be in ZoomInfo. ZoomInfo lets people register and add or correct information about their profiles. ZoomInfo minimizes duplicates by requiring specific information on profiles -- such as name, current title, company and basic bio information. The resulting 36 million profiles is a subset of its 80 million names. Moreover, he said only 16 million of those profiles have contact information such as email address.]

Xing went public in December 2006. In March 2007, Xing acquired eConozco, a Spanish contact networks for professionals, and in May it launched a job marketplace.

The integration between Xing’s platform and ZoomInfo’s search engine will happen in fall.

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Spock, a secretive Menlo Park start-up incubated with $1 million from Clearstone Venture Partners, will unveil a search engine for people by the end of the year.

From a demo we’ve seen, we think it could be a powerful addition. Spock could take this in some interesting directions. Its main challenge will be to wean users from Google as a first stop, though more on that in a sec.

When Spock launches, it will have 100 million profiles of people in its database, by far the largest open repository of profiles anywhere. Spock delivers a mixture of facts and research on a people, but also opens a profile to social input, giving it a touch of Wikipedia.

This move is a no-brainer, and it makes you wonder why no one has done this yet.

LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and other people-contact related sites were built in different eras, and have focused on specific subsets of people (LinkedIn and ZoomInfo on business execs, for example). Spock, however, exploits all the latest tagging technology and the exploding number of public profiles on the Web since social network sites like MySpace became popular last year.

Scrubbing millions of profiles from the Web wasn’t an obvious thing to do when Palo Alto’s LinkedIn launched several years ago. LinkedIn began as a contact site, allowing people to request meetings through their layers of relationships. It has since tried to move toward a more open model. Indeed, LinkedIn is aggressively building out its people profiles even as we write. (Last week, it also kicked off a major expansion into Europe and Asia as part of a land-grab, with a German version to go live soon.)

Spock starts from the other end. Spock dispenses with the “contact” element of LinkedIn. It is an open site, for people seeking information about other people.

ZoomInfo, which you must pay a subscription for, has 29 million profiles. LinkedIn has about 9 million profiles, and wants to grow to 100 million by 2008. Spock’s 100 million, meanwhile, will only grow, according to co-founders Jaideep Singh and Jay Bhatti.

If Google is a place to find Web sites that are relevant for your search, and Amazon is place to find goods, then Spock wants to let you find people, they argue.

Here’s an example of how it works: If you type in “actress,” Spock returns results like Google — with listings down a page. In this case, the first entry is Felicity Huffman, who Spock’s engine finds as the most relevant for “actress.” (Now, if you type in “actress” into Google, you’ll see why Spock has a chance; there are few actresses in the results, except for the annoying site ActressArchives at the top). Moreover, as both Spock and LinkedIn make their profiles more popular, these will rank higher in Google’s results anyway.

Continuing with our “actress” example, you first get a photo of Huffman, but you also get a bunch of tags underneath telling you how she is relevant. For example, there’s tag for “Oscar nominee for best actress,” and “Desperate Housewives,” for which she is well known. There’s a “Wikipedia” tag. If you click on these tags, Spock will take you its relevant results for that tag. This gives users a way of searching for information related to the Huffman.

The tag font size gets smaller if Spock’s engine detects the tag isn’t relevant for the person. So if users create a “sexy” tag for Huffman, the tag may get larger or smaller, depending on how many people agree. Spock gives users an option of clicking on the tag and selecting “yes” or “no.” If they select no, Spock factors this into its database. Then, if you type in “sexy actress,” Huffman will have fallen slightly in the ranking. Spock has built ways to keep people from gaming the system. If you want to add tags, for example, you have register — one way for Spock to monitor usage.

Nicole Kidman is the second result under “actress,” even though she won an Oscar (Huffman was only a nominee). Why would an engine rank a nominee higher than an actual winner? Chief executive Jaideep Singh says Spock’s engine factors in hundreds of variables for its algorithm on determining relevance. This is Spock’s secret sauce, he says. We asked if his algorithm takes advantage of Google’s APIs. He said yes, but there are many other sources, he said.

Spock will make money by running relevant advertising beside the profile results.

Spock has seven employees in Menlo Park, two in India, and six more part-time.

Singh and Jay Bhatti met in business school. Bhatti has a background in consulting, having worked at Accenture, Deloitte and Microsoft. Singh was a VC at Clearstone and worked at WindRiver. Jeff Winner, VP of engineering hails from Friendster, eGroups and Netscape.

David Stern, the investor at Clearstone (who contributed an op-ed to VentureBeat here) said the investment is a return to his firm’s roots as in investor in consumer companies — eToys, Overture, PayPal, United Online, MP3.com and eMusic are among them.