Blank, DanielDanielBlankBoosz, SebastianSebastianBooszHenrich, AndreasAndreasHenrich0000-0002-5074-32542019-09-192016-06-152016978-1-4503-3739-7https://fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/40573Identifying 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".engCompany searchExpertise retrievalExpert searchDomain specific search solutionsIR systemsconferenceobject10.1145/2851613.2851695