Just last week I was musing about the SEM and PPC potential of B2B search. Well, it seems that others are following the trend. As a recent press release from ZoomInfo.com explains:

In April, ZoomInfo unveiled its new ZoomInfo.com site to address the specific needs of business information searchers. ZoomInfo.com users are business people looking for comprehensive information on industries, companies, people, products and services. ZoomInfo delivers highly relevant results that are optimized for its business-oriented audience. Whereas traditional search engines treat a search for "enterprise router" as a set of keywords and return a mixed-bag of results, ZoomInfo's semantic search technology understands that "enterprise router" is a unique business concept - in this case a product - and returns a list of companies that compete in the enterprise router business.

With its partnership with Ask.com, ZoomInfo.com is opening a powerful B2B marketing platform to online advertisers. ZoomInfo's business users, coupled with the search engine's highly relevant results, create a high impact opportunity for B2B advertisers. ZoomInfo.com users average about 15.5 million business-oriented searches each month. Through the new relationship with Ask.com, B2B advertisers will be able to place targeted advertising next to these highly focused business searches.

Honestly, it really is about time that search engine start paying attention to the B2B users. After all, personalized search is a huge trend in SEM these days, and the underlying assumption of it is that different users want different results. Well, some people are two different kinds of users depending on when and where they're searching from. To ignore the B2B user baser, then, is to overlook a huge opportunity for SEM and affiliate marketing.