I have no interest of becoming a member. However, it was the only option to correct or modify the information.

Zoominfo needs to be more responsible of that information they gather and publish since they do it without people’s awareness and approval. If they recognize a quality issue, they need to error proof it until effective corrective actions are in place.

First of all, we don’t charge anybody to edit or update their profile. That is a free service, and we believe that we’re providing people a real benefit by collecting all the references about them on the web, and allowing them to control their web presence by having an up-to-date ZoomInfo profile that shows up highly ranked in Google search results. All for free.

Secondly, our customers that do pay for our service all recognize that the data we compile has inaccuracies — just like any other large data-set. In fact, in very clear view, we tell our users “This profile was automatically generated using information found on the Internet. This information has not been verified.” However, the real value we deliver to them is the ability to make connections and find information that they never would have found without ZoomInfo. Our semantic search engine is able to make connections and associations that allows a user to, say, search for managing directors, located in the UK, in finance, with experience in healthcare. This kind of search could never be done in Google, Hoovers, or any other dataset without huge teams of researchers to cull through and summarize the data. This is where the real value is: finding information about businesses and people that can’t be found anywhere else.

The good news for those that do require higher levels of accuracy is that we are launching significant improvements to our algorithms in the coming months. To start, we’ll be improving our refresh rate to daily. This will deliver a much fresher dataset (and thus more accurate since as you know accuracy is a function of time). Since the internet is constantly updated by the various stakeholders looking to get their information out there, we believe it is the freshest source of data in the world, and ZoomInfo will now bring this freshness to our users. As a next step, we are going to be releasing significant improvements to the core data itself, which will further improve the experience for our users.

In the end, we want to be the largest, most accurate, most “searchable,” and most up-to-date source of business information on the planet. We’re not there yet, but we are able to deliver significant value today for a lot of users, and I think we’ll get there soon. We’re certainly trying hard!

Thanks again for your post and to your readers for their comments.

Obnoxious is right – paying to fix incorrect listings that we didn’t ask for is irresponsible and very irritating. I am surprised that many people will see their incorrect listings for free and still be willing to pay to access other listings that are probably just as incorrect.

What’s really annoying is that they are somehow managing to get high up in the Google results too. A google search for my own name pulls them up on the first page.

Nice content niche you’ve carved out here by the way. Good writing too. I quoted you and I ranted a bit about ZoomInfo as part of a post I did about potential employers searching your name as part of the hiring practice.