Spock which publicly launched August 8th, is a new people search engine, helping users find and discover other people on the Web. It was founded by Jaideep Singh (CEO) and Jay Bhatti (VP Product) and received $7 million in financing from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital Ventures, months before the beta service was even planned to launch.

As Catherine Holahan from BusinessWeek writes:

“A Google search for an individual may return tens of thousands of links in milliseconds. But it won’t display a concise summary of all the information available on the Web about that person, such as her occupation, her interests and hobbies, her age, marital status, where she’s from, and what she looks like. That’s where Bhatti’s company, Spock, comes in. His people search engine, scheduled for launch in July, is one of the dozens of niche endeavors trying to capture some of the more than $60 billion projected to be spent on search marketing over the next four years.”

Spock’s focus is on people. The only kind of search results you get is a list of people. So for example, if you search for republicans or sushi or bloggers, the results will be lists of people associated with your search. The algorithm is probably based on the page rank or frequency analysis algorithm used by Google – but tailored to people.

Spock also uses tags in a very unique way. The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds. It gathers information on people from Wikipedia, and social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. However Spock also lets users add tags of their own, and vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics. Spock leverages a combination of automated tags and people power for tagging. Individuals can claim their own page, and clearly each one of us has an interest in doing that.

A unique kind of tag in Spock is called ‘relationships’, and it’s what connects people together. For example, Chelsea is related to Clinton because she is his daughter, but Bush is related to Clinton because he is the successor to the title of President. These relationships are shown on Spock and taken together, they weave an intricate web of connections between people.

Spock also lets people vote on the existing “facts” (tags/relationships) and it re-arranges information to reflect the votes. However, you should know that the system is not yet tuned to do this correctly all the time.

It will be interesting to see how Spock balances people’s desire to manage their own image with the public data the search engine finds. It will also be very interesting to see how Spock manages spamming of tags, websites associated with people, and other user-contributed data.

As Michael Arrington writes:

“People search is a space that went from nowhere to crowded, fast. Wink changed direction and launched a people search product last November. Also in this space is Streakr, ProfileLinker, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and Upscoop. Unlike the others (for the most part), Spock goes way beyond searching just social networks for people information. They are positioning themselves specifically against Google for web search and Amazon for product search, saying the third important type of search is information about people, and that 30% of Internet searches are people-related. Wink is Spock’s closest competitor among all of the ones listed above.”

While testing the site myself,  I found its results to be quite accurate and I enjoyed the user-friendly interface. With an estimated 20 billion search queries about people done per month, Spock is positioning itself to dominate the people search space. This is definitely a product and a company to watch.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 1:25 pm and is filed under People Search, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.