Imagine trying to search the Internet without the luxury of a search engine. Google, Alta Vista, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Ask, and the like are owned by companies that have developed technologies using algorithms that search the more than 100 million Web sites on the Internet.
If search engines did not exist, Internet users would have to rely on typing in URLs and using links from Web pages to navigate.
However, as the Internet becomes increasingly cluttered with content, those search engines are limited when it comes to helping users sift through the content for specific applications.
“Google does a fantastic job and so does (Windows) Live of indexing the Internet and giving you the ability to type something in, press a button and get search results,” said Donato Diorio, founder and chief executive officer of Pewaukee-based Broadlook Technologies Inc. “(But) no one is looking at the actual process people go through after they press the search button.”
Broadlook’s newest product, Diver, is a software application designed for recruiters and sales professionals who build prospect lists by searching company Web sites. Instead of visiting every Web site on the search results page to find contact information, Diver extracts the contact information from every search result, including name, title, company, phone number, email address and the Web site address in which the information was found.
“Diver has been very big for recruiting, because it is our core market,” Diorio said. “For anyone looking for business contacts, Diver is a huge time saver.”
The extracted information is compiled in a spreadsheet that can be edited, printed and imported to e-mail accounts and other contact management software.
Broadlook developed a resume version that will be available this fall to search the “experience” sections of resumes across the Internet, Diorio said.
Broadlook is looking for vendor partnerships to customize Diver to any specialized search, for example recipes.
“(Users) could search for recipes and have a specialty grid that gets rid of recipes without gluten or that were created for diabetic diets,” Diorio said.
Diver costs $2,000 for an annual license for one user and $500 for each additional user. Free demos are available at www.broadlook.com. Broadlook is currently offering a free seven-day trial of Diver for those interested in testing it out.
“I have not seen other tools like this in the marketplace,” said Camille Crist, executive director for St. Louis-based Grant Cooper & Associates.
Crist has used Broadlook Diver for one month, about as long as it has been available. Crist uses other Broadlook products to search for leads on the Internet, including Profiler, Contact Capture and Eclipse.
Grant Cooper & Associates performs specialized searches within a Web site to find a specific job, title, degree or school for a potential candidate. Some searches find up to 1,000 hits. Instead of clicking on each hit, with Diver, Crist can review a spreadsheet in columns with the information she was searching for. She can look for names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses for individuals specific to her search and delete mismatches from the spreadsheet. The cost and employee time saved in one month alone will have a large impact on her company’s costs, employee time and employee progress, Crist said.
“By the time you get a Web site open to figure out where the information is that you are pulling, several minutes have gone by,” Crist said. “So, with 100 hits, it will take about 200 minutes or more, which is a minimum of 3-1/2 hours of work. When you are paying someone $25, $30 plus an hour, sometimes more, the cost adds up pretty quickly.”
What takes eight hours manually takes just a few minutes with Diver extracting data, said Shally Steckerl, founder of www.jobmachine.net, a training and consulting firm for recruiters based in Atlanta, which is a certified partner of Broadlook and trains professionals to use Diver.
“It gets you there faster. Much faster,” Steckerl said of Diver.
