Reed Elsevier is one of the largest, most influential publishers in the world, a powerhouse in the science and medical, legal, education and business markets. But the company also has a major online presence, with more than 1,000 web sites in just its business group.

Last year, Reed Business decided to leverage this significant online presence by creating Zibb, a business-to-business search engine that allows users to search across all of Reed Business' web sites. But Zibb goes beyond that—Reed also indexes billions of other business-related URLs from all over the web, including competitor web sites.

The result is a very powerful B2B search engine that often returns much better results for business-related queries than mainstream search engines.

Reed Business also decided to integrate this technology into the site search tools for its web sites, which range from the Asia Food Journal to entertainment bellwether Variety. Using search technology from FAST, Zibb on Demand allows each of these sites to offer their own content and the best of the web that's related to the site's specialty.

To oversee these efforts, Reed Business hired Stephen Baker to be CEO of Reed Business Search. Stephen is a long-time industry veteran, having put in stints with FAST during its AlltheWeb days, on to Overture and Yahoo, and then back to FAST as general manager of enterprise search. So he's the ideal person to drive a search group that covers a vast vertical slice of the web, as well as content from a huge global enterprise.

I caught up with Stephen this week to find out what's new with Zibb and talk about the opportunities he sees going forward in B2B search.

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