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.
... Read more
The PeekYou people search engine launched today in open beta. It's yet another site (see Wink and Spock) designed to help you find people.
Surely we can do better than this.
(Credit: CNET Networks)If you're interested in this space, my recommendation is to use Wink. Spock is still in closed beta, and PeekYou's current beta is unimpressive. Despite the company's claim of 50 million people in the database, there are many duplicates (over 700 entries for George Bush, each with a few links--and typing George W. Bush doesn't work to narrow the results). And there's no good way to tell who's who in a list of similar names. Which of the seven Stephen Hawkings returned is the physicist? None of them, as it turns out (the one link tagged with a U.K. location goes to a fake MySpace page).
In searching for my own name (vanity, thy name is Blogger), I found links to an out-of-date personal blog, MySpace, and Ryze (a social network I haven't used since 2002), but nothing current. No Webware, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
PeekYou claims similar features to Spock and Wink: Users can "claim" their own profile and even make themselves unlisted. But my advice is to not get sucked into this product. It's barely ready for public access, and certainly not worth the time if you've got an important search to do.
We're also checking out Gleamd, an aggregator on comments about people, which is still in private beta.
The people search engine Spock is still in very private beta, but the doors opened up a crack this morning when a few more people were let in to the system, including me. Now that I've been able to play with the service, it's easy to see that Spock's creators are trying to build more than just a Google of people. Spock is also being built to map the relationships of people to each other.
Spock wants password access to your online contact lists.
This is made clear when beta users activate their invitation code. Spock asks you first for your personal connections: It wants you to provide a password to one system you use that has a personal address book. The options are LinkedIn, Plaxo, Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, or Yahoo. Spock does a one-time slurp from the contact list you give it. It says it uses the information so it can add your contacts to Spock, which is pretty cool and will make Spock look better to you, but by providing password access to your accounts, you're helping Spock get data it couldn't otherwise get from the public Web. In particular, you're providing not just names and data to fill out the Spock database, but also the connections between people.
As I said in my preview of Spock, I think the company is really building the framework for a social network, not just a search engine. Or perhaps, when it comes to databases of people, there's no clear difference.
Spock will find itself
(Credit: CNET Networks)I'm still looking forward to the full release of Spock, partly because the company is putting so much work into solving the very thorny problem of resolving its database so different people with the same name are handled the right way. Other people-search technologies (see Wink) just punt on this, and display separate records for each hit on a name they find (example).
Spock's current beta is pretty rough, and the database is far from complete, especially for noncelebrities. The dodge of getting new users to populate the database is very clever, and it should help. It does creep me out, though. Let me put it this way: If you happened to be in my Plaxo database, how would you feel about me sending all the details that I have on you over to Spock?
See also: TechCrunch on the likely fortunes for three competing people search engines.
The first Web 2.0 Expo is behind us, and it was a good show. In addition to dozens of interesting panels (including, if I do say so, mine), there were about 115 companies presenting on a crowded expo show floor, and six interesting company presentations during the "Launchpad" sessions that ran on Monday and Tuesday.
With Webware.com's Josh Lowensohn and News.com's Erica Ogg, we picked our Top 5 Web 2.0 services from the conference. They are:
- Tellme, which has a new downloadable app for getting useful 411-like info on your mobile phone. (news)
- Octopz, a very slick collaboration service we covered a few days ago. (hands-on)
- Dapper, which can make any Web site into an RSS feed or widget. (field report)
- Coghead, a Web-based database that just came out of beta. (hands-on)
- Spock, the upcoming people search engine. (preview)
Play the video for the full rundown.
I got a chance to sit down with the founders of the people search engine, Spock, in advance of the company's grand unveiling, which will be during the LaunchPad sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo. Spock is Yet Another Search Engine, but it's an important one--it searches for people. You type in a name and it will show you everything it knows about that person and where it found the data. Or, if you search on a term, it will find people that match it. For example, search for "boxer," and Mohammad Ali shows up, not underpants or dogs.
It's a very useful idea, and the Spock team has gone further than just building a raw search engine. Each person gets his or her own page, and the system tags people. John Edwards is tagged U.S. Senate, among other things. Users can easily "rotate" on those tags, to see who else fits into that category--just like we do in Flickr, for example.
Spock finds people by name or attributes.
(Credit: Spock)Users can also tag people manually, and vote on which tags are accurate and which are not. Likewise, if there are multiple photographs of a person attached to a record, users can vote on which one is best. (Finding videos for people records is on the road map, but won't be included at launch.) Spock's founders hope that using human input on top of computer-generated results will make for a quality search database.
It's too early to say, though, how good the results will be. The founders I met with, Jaideep Singh and Jay Bharti, said they'll have 100 million people in their database by launch. That's a lot, but there are 6 billion people on the planet, so it won't be the global White Pages for a while. Also, in our demo, the results were inconsistent. The founders attributed this to a server hiccup; and later in the demo results were much better.
Other interesting features: In Spock, users will be able to "claim" their own names, much like homeowners can claim their houses on Zillow. Authorization will be by proving you have access to one of your personal data sources, like a MySpace or LinkedIn page. Once you've claimed your name you can have ultimate authority over aspects of it, such as which picture displays, and you can add in your own data (like contact info) and decide who gets to see it. At some point, feature creep could make Spock into a de facto social network, although the founders adamantly claim that's not in their plan: they get data from the social networks, they say, they don't want to compete with them. But if Spock is successful, why wouldn't you start to use it to keep track of your friends, or post personal information, or try to find jobs through it?
We also foresee issues surrounding Spock identify theft. The founders say they're still working on some antispam and antigaming systems in the engine.
One of the coolest features we talked about (but did not see) is the system's capability to import your personal contact list--from Outlook or from your private contact list on a site like LinkedIn--and then perform searches against that list. The example we got: say you want to find which of your 2,000 Outlook contacts are golfers in San Francisco. Spock will be able to merge your list of names with its search results to tell you that. Pretty neat, if it works.
People pages pull data from numerous sources.
(Credit: Spock)Spock will be compared to another people search tool, Wink. Wink is live, and Spock's just a demo, so you can't make a final comparison. But based on what we've seen, Spock's feature set does look much richer, and it also appears that Spock will do a better job of merging data from multiple sources into coherent records for individuals.
People are eagerly awaiting Spock's launch, so they can Spock themselves, their friends, and their ex-lovers (you know that's what you'll do first, too). We're going to have to wait, though. The site won't open up until sometime after the private beta begins, on April 16.
For another preview, see TechCrunch.
- prev
- 1
- next
