Spock now live, open to everyone

Spock, a new search engine that searches for people, has opened its doors to all as of this morning. I was actually able to use the service freely early yesterday, but things were a bit slow going--and still are. How does it stack up? Well, we got our hands on it a few months back while it was still in private beta and came away with a few concerns, mostly about the speed and its database of noncelebrities.

To my surprise, however, a quick search this morning picked up a good number of people in my family, many of whom have no real Internet presence. The service claims to have more than 100 million people in its database as of this morning. If you can't find yourself, you can register with the service and claim your name.

Charles Cooper over at CNET News.com has an interesting Q&A with Spock's CEO and cofounder Jaideep Singh. Some of the topics discussed include what content the service is indexing, the business plan, and some background on how the tool works.

Below is a widget of some Spock results. As you can see, feeding it "John Smith" is hardly a fair task, yielding everything from politicians to porn stars.To see it, click the read more link below.