Identifying a competent service provider or contractor is not an easy task. This is especially true in the IT sector with its short-lived trends and products. In this context an"IT Company Atlas" giving substantiated information about the IT companies in a certain region seems to be a promising idea. However, a B2B directory administered manually for this purpose is expensive to establish and to maintain. An alternative approach discussed in this paper is to apply expert search techniques and provide a search engine searching for companies instead of documents.
We propose a system searching for companies with expertise in a given field sketched by a keyword query. The system exploits the websites of the companies and covers all aspects: determining and representing the expertise of the companies, query processing and retrieval models, as well as query formulation and result presentation. In addition to the theoretical background and a system description we present experimental results comparing the effectiveness of different retrieval models adopted from expert search in the scenario we call "company search".