The newest entry in the search engine market has a terrible name but an intriguing value proposition.

Plonked Inc. describes its namesake search engine as a tool to significantly improve users’ ability to discover, analyze and connect with businesses. You can search on a company name to get detailed a profile or keywords to find companies that the search engine thinks best match your criteria.

The answer to any Plonked query is a company profile or list. For tech companies in particular, the profiles are quite rich, particularly if the company has an active social media presence.

For example, a search on HubSpot Inc. turns up a profile with an editable description, funding, employee population and a list of similar companies. There’s also a profile of the leadership team that clicks through to a list of previous employers and companies in which the person has invested. Finally, there’s a list of recent headlines.

You can also click through to an interesting interactive exploration view that lets you navigate across companies to see how they are connected to each other, their partners and their customers (see above).

Connections are at the heart of Plonked’s design. The experience is oriented around guiding you toward connections between companies and between yourself and others. Upon registering, Plonked invites you to add your connections. Once imported, the search engine user shared connections to help you find contacts in common, similar to LinkedIn.

The company says it’s already discovered that businesses are a lot more tightly integrated than was thought. Instead of six degrees of separation, Plonked says it’s more like 3.5. “Even the most obscure small businesses are in fact connected to the other 24 million businesses in the U.S. in just 3 to 4 hops,” said CEO Ankur Varma in a press release.

Plonked parses news feeds and social networks as well as various public and proprietary knowledge bases to impute overall health metrics such as media traction and network reach. While the functionality is primitive compared to that of social media analytics tools, it’s not bad for the price.

The company is positioning the search engine as a lead generation tool for identifying prospects that are similar to existing customers and which have first- and second-degree connections.

Plonked is still a work in progress, and some data is inexplicably missing. For example, a search on “Ogilvy” doesn’t turn up Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Inc., which is one of the world’s largest advertising agencies.

But it’s different, and that’s rare in search these days. See for yourself. Plonked is live now.