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July 27, 2007
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Why do you believe that personal search is something the market really wants now?
Singh: Two or three things, frankly. The reason we built this company was the problem we faced every day. I was sitting there with my co-founder and I would try to look at my contacts. I use Outlook and I'd say, "OK, you know what? I'm a venture capitalist and I'm looking to find a marketing vice president for one of my companies." I know at least 30 of these guys. I've met them, but I just can't remember who they are. I know that information is out there somewhere so I'd look in my contacts and I wouldn't be able to find that person. Then I'd go to Google and type in their name. But there's so much noise and so many documents that it'd be really hard to find that information. Then I'd go to LinkedIn, which is a lot better actually if we're looking for VP marketing, but again, you just get that biographical data about that person. This was really the source of the problem.
So, to answer your question, No. 1 was it was a real pain point that we were seeing every day. We knew we were building an application that's going to be in the order of magnitude better than anything out there. Secondly, our beta has been going on for a couple of months and we have a lot of users in our beta and we're seeing that the feedback has been phenomenal--people are really finding this to be utilitarian and interesting.
Was that frustration the genesis of the idea behind Spock?
Singh: That was the genesis of the idea and that's when we realized that we're in a very interesting state in the market where there's a lot of people-related information out there, people have their bio pages under "about me," people have their MySpace page and so on and so forth.
OK, vertical search. What about the barrier to entry? You guys were able to put something together in a reasonably short time. If the space is so hot why wouldn't--or why couldn't--some company with the resources of a Google also decide this makes sense to focus on?
Singh: I think we have lots of barriers to entry. No 1 is that people love the product. We're going to scale this really fast, so that itself is a huge thing. Secondly, from a technology standpoint, this is not easy stuff to re-create. We have a lot of very competent people from engineering who have come from leading search engines out there and these are people with a lot of experience. It's not like putting together a much simpler consumer site that is just a couple of databases.
What is going to be the business model?
Singh: The business model is actually pretty straightforward. It's targeted advertising, very much similar to search that is there today.
When I looked up different bits of information before sitting down for this interview, I found Spock to be a bit thin. Is the search algorithm only being directed toward certain prechosen Web repositories of information? What are your plans there?
Singh: It's just a hard problem to have a ton of data on day one. Even if you look at Google, they started with a much smaller index and grew that daily after the launch. The thing about Spock is every day you come, there's new data and new content being added or indexed.
I'm a sports fan and I when I clicked on the name of an old football player, George Sauer, one of the links that came up was the University of Nebraska. But when I clicked there, I expected more specific information about Sauer and his career. Instead, it brought up a browser full of people who had some connection to the University of Nebraska. It wasn't really clear what the point was.
Singh: I think that's a great point. We are collecting feedback and improving our user interface and our service right now. The fact of the matter is sometimes we can find something about a person in a document and we give a link to that document. I think what we need to do is make our URLs as deep as possible. That's a problem we know about and we'll fix it.
When the service is entirely built out to your satisfaction, how will it look differently from what it looks like today?
Singh: There will be a lot more links and content. Although there is a ton of information about people today on the Web, it's very fragmented over thousands of different sites. As we index more data, what you'll find is that when you do a search, you'll get the most relevant results. It may be a little bit light for some people right now but that's going to increase over time.
You've talked about people-related search taking off in the same way that Google grew. But that's a really big statement considering how far Google's come in such a brief time. Netting out the hype, what's your realistic expectation?
Singh: I think we're going to see exactly the same trajectory and I say this not because it's just a hope and dream. If it's not us, someone will do this. The problem is universal. About 30 percent of search traffic for all search engines is people-related traffic. That's huge. It's actually the largest category of search today.
It's not just Google. They go to LinkedIn or to Outlook to search their contacts. Or Gmail or on their mobile phones. It's something they do often. We project that an average person does a people-related search about 10 times a day, that's why the need is broad and that's why we think this is a product that's designed for everybody.
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17 comments
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Prepare To Beam Up Scotty! Wow.
You should have picked a name like Troll Hard that nobody else has like me. Nobody will sue me over that name.
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?
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...
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.
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.
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.spock.com/" target="_newWindow">http://www.spock.com/</a>
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.
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.
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!
Check that all words are spelled correctly.
Try more general terms.
Here's my client listed as pres. of my company!
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://center.spoke.com/info/p6V50Dx/MukeshLulla" target="_newWindow">http://center.spoke.com/info/p6V50Dx/MukeshLulla</a>
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. :-)