Comments on: Spock: Search's final frontier?

As the search engine goes live, co-founder Jaideep Singh explains why he thinks the new search engine's people-related focus can spell the difference.

[Commander_Spock]

Oh! Oh!, Should Commander_Spock litigate!

"CNET News.com recently sat down the CEO co-founder Jaideep Singh to find out more. By the way, Singh says the company name has nothing to do with the Starship Enterprise's Vulcan science officer. It's an acronym for Single Point of Contact and Knowledge...."!!! Nah. How about financial contributions from "SPOCK" for the name use (for the enhancement of OS/2 WARP) to maintain a "TREKIE" like focus. After all we have all go to return to the STARS from whence we came!

Prepare To Beam Up Scotty! Wow.

[Troll Hard]

Paramount might be able to litigate

or the estate of Gene Roddenberry. You don't own the copyright and trademark on the Spock name and they could sue you as well.

You should have picked a name like Troll Hard that nobody else has like me. Nobody will sue me over that name.

[loki_racer]

Server is deadly slow

I have tried running some searches on spock.com and they are deadly slow.

[Commander_Spock]

>>>"Server is deadly slow"<<<

Maybe, they should move to bring the WARP ENGINES (OS/2 Warp Servers) online!

[Marcus Westrup]

What are their privacy safeguards?

By data mining the net and collecting so much personal data in one place, there is a risk of exposing private details on people. A Name here, a SIN number there, and you end up with enough to allow ID theft.
You can claim that this information is already freely available (because it was found on the 'Net) but a lawyer might see it differently.

In short, do they screen/limit any of the data they collect?

[Fireweaver]

Privacy issue

It will be interesting to see how much data really gets collected here.
So far it's not much; I used it for my name and came up with nothing; including none of the info available on a simple Google Search.

Depending on where they go with this, though, you could easily see Public records being added, like marriage, home ownership, phone numbers.
It would make the site more "Useful" if they did this, because they would have everything on the person you were seeking to find.

But talk about a frightening Privacy issue if they went that way. They wouldn't last with all of the lawsuits.

We'll see where they tread on this muddy ground...

[NavalArya]

too slow

the site is not working for me.. ! I am already getting 505 internal server errors.

[shanedr]

Search accuracy dropping

I don't know what they're doing at Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. But the accuracy of search returns is seriously dropping. More and more I get returns for news about a website instead of the actual website.

When I do a search I expect the first returns to provide access to what I searched for, not to an article about what I searched for.

All the search engines need to place returns for news stories and articles at the end of the returns.

[ericallenpaul]

Too Slow

Google returns similar results--just a heck of a lot faster.

[mattumanu]

Beta tester here...

I beta tested this peice of crap. First of all, they are mining people's contact lists. They want you to allow them to log onto your gmail account, outlook account, or whatever might have a contact list, then indexing that.

Second of all, an entry is an open book. You can upload pictures to an entry, even if they are totally unrelated to entry in question. During beta testing this was demonstrated to the spock team by someone uploading pictures of daffy duck to entries like oprah winfrey's. Was anything done to fix that situation? No.

Third of all, it's possible to vandalize an entry without hacking the entry. All one needs to do is upload any manner of photos to the entry as well as mess with the tags. Tagging is out of control as any tag can be added whether it accurately discribes the entry or not. These issues have also not been addressed.

Fourth of all, there is no way to lock down an entry if it is being repeatedly vandalized. Unlike a wiki, these entries open to editing at all times.

Fifth, and probably most disturbing, is that it's been stated by the spock team on their own blog that the only way to get your name removed from their system is to remove ALL of your social network accounts. That means no myspace, no facebook, no anything! AND, should the information in your entry turn out to be inaccurate, AND you can't claim your entry, you have no recourse to fix the problem, WHATSOEVER.

So keep in mind, it may be a search engine, but it's purpose it merely to index social network sites.

[Troll Hard]

Sounds like another MySpace clone

This is the web site:
http://www.spock.com/

Currently when I just checked it was down due to some problems.

I hope they aren't stealing the data like stealing pictures off of web sites that are copyrighted as pictures of people you are looking for.

[albertsoler]

Remember Spike v. Spike?

When Spike Lee sued Spike TV, it generated much attention and free publicity for the new channel. Some Urban Legends claim that may have been premeditated by both parties. I doubt it.

In this case, however, Paramount's lawyers probably won't be too amenable to a settlement. I predict that the SPOCK moniker will be gone by the end of the year.

[caudio_roma]

As a search engine it absolutely sucks :(

This so called search engine was not able to return results for anything that I was looking for!
Why is Cnet hyping this junk?
Oh wait, it is VC funded & it is in Silicon Valley area and has Stanford connections so of course this means that the Big media (Silicon Valley) machinery immediately will cover it & hype it to see if enough people will fall for it. Same as with 2nd life, TWeeter and other useless junk, which the only thing that they all have in common is that they are VC funded & based in Silicon Valley (San Fran area). I cant believe people have not woken up to this Game yet!

[sivanand_m]

Give me all the astronauts

Suggestions:

Check that all words are spelled correctly.
Try more general terms.

[wayne_67]

try to search for...

..."Christian"...and wonder about the results...

[Neotrope]

Will Spock be better than Spoke.com ?

The problem with all these automated company and personnnel companies is that nobody seems to care if the info is correct, and some like Spoke.com provide no means to correct the info without becoming a registered customer/user. For instance, my company is Neotrope, and on one of our business sites we posted a press release about our client Team F1. Now, when you go to Spoke, it shows my client as the president of my company. Idiots. I've even contacted them with no reply. Clearly asleep at the wheel and spreading mis-information seems to not be a legal or business concern. Will Spock be different?

Here's my client listed as pres. of my company!
http://center.spoke.com/info/p6V50Dx/MukeshLulla

BAH! The goal for these kinds of sites seems to be a method of collecting then selling data, or allowing "members" or "subscribers" to use the data as marketing and lead generation tools. Why would I want my business info on any of these sites -- in fact, I don't. IP blocking is a great thing. :-)