Spock, the Redwood City, Calif. search engine for people, launches tomorrow after a year of suspense.
It has remained secretive for months (see our original coverage), testing its engine, adding some 100,000 profiles and inserting other social networking features. In those past stories, we showed examples of how profile pages of people contain all sorts of information about people.
We asked chief exec Jaideep Singh how he plans to make money. He said the company will serve ads next to searches just like Google does, though it will wait a few months before doing so.
Spock’s focus is key. If it can make people search fun and memorable, it has a chance to steal searchers from Google. About 30 percent of searches on Google are for people (Spock estimates that 20 billion searches are done on people monthly across all search engines), even if a good chunk is vanity search. People are obsessed with themselves and with others. Spock could prove more useful to Google if it mines the Web for all the information about someone and then organizes it coherently. Below is an example of a small profile of Dick Cheney found when searching for “President” (he’s not president, but as Vice President he ranks high in results).
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LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and Xing, all services that compete in some way with Spock, by offering business information about people, do not have the same interactive features. On Spock, you can submit a tag on a person, labeling him say, a “funny guy.” Other users can then come along and give a thumbs up on the tag. As second, third and fourth endorsements are made, the tag grows in size, reflecting it is a significant trait about the person. In the case of Dick Cheney, early test users appear to have marked Cheney “acting President.”
Here’s a way Spock differs from Google: Type “boxer” into Spock, and its top search results are Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson. Type it into Google, and it returns a Wikipedia entry for a “boxer” dog.
Spock also allows you to create widgets of your favorite searches, and paste them into your blog. See our example of Web 2.0 venture capitalists in image below. You can go in and click on the profiles, and vote (by clicking on the Web 2.0 tag) whether you agree or not that the VC should be ranked highly as a Web 2.0 VC. If you vote no, it will help drive that VC down in the rankings.
Tags: co:spock10 Comments
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a.non said:
Very disappointing! After all that hype :-(
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Mahasureshi Shiva said:
Spock needs some help. The model is interesting, but it will take a bit of time and help to get over the tipping point. One BIG problem… multiple iterations (and different content) for the same person/entity.
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David Somerset said:
Not NEARLY as interesting as WikiYou…
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Jaideep Singh said:
Dear VentureBeat Readers,
After a very successful private beta, we launched the Spock public beta today with great fanfare. During the private beta period we created a strong community of users, bloggers, and reviewers. For this we are very grateful.
In anticipation of our public beta launch, we had catered for peak capacity of 100 page views a second, which translates to 300 million page views a month. However, since this morning we have been getting a consistent request rate of 300 to 400 page views a second, which translates to nearly 1 billion page views a month.
Although this level of demand is gratifying, we sincerely apologize for not being able to serve it all. The entire Spock team is working hard to add more capacity today and tomorrow. Please bear with us while we add more bandwidth to meet the needs of our global user base.
Sincerely,
Jaideep Singh
Co-founder & CEO -
Dee said:
Someone in marketing and advertising needs a raise. I can’t get the site to load. Keep up the good work. Some initial bumps in the road were expected.
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Martin Levy said:
At every turn there is a request for login/password for other services like LinkedIn or Plaxo or whatever. This worries me.
The value of having self auditing of content is fine, but I don’t agree with the “cheap way out” of collecting everyone’s passwords. I expects the smarts to be done by Spock.com vs. me. Plus… never give out you password… Never.
Finally, I would say that the potential is there. It’s as slow as molasses and could do with a face lift already… Didn’t anyone learn anything from Flickr and its very clean interfaces?
Martin
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Brian Galovits said:
I applaud Spock for a great idea and vision; it will be interesting to watch how the user base can affect the tags for searches and how this will change searching all together. For a business-person search that saves time Broadlook Technologies’ Diver is a great way to find people. Diver extracts the contact information from the links returned from search engines, eliminating the need to click on every result to find contacts. Broadlook offers a short overview video and free trial here:Diver
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Joshua A. Trevino said:
Thank You
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Craig Butz said:
This site is being hyped to the exclusion of some very real privacy concerns: http://craigiest.blogspot.com/2008/03/spockcom-review-no-its-just-creepy.html
15 Trackbacks
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Josiah Cole dot com » Spock is a Search Engine Made of People! said:
[...] clipped from venturebeat.com [...]
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VentureBeat People search engine Spock launches « Spiderfood911 Search Engine Optimization and Web 2.0 said:
[...] clipped from venturebeat.com [...]
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Media lui Comanescu » Spock.com said:
[...] Sursa/detalii. [...]
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People search engine Spock launches (Matt Marshall/VentureBeat) said:
[...] People search engine Spock launches — Spock, the Redwood City, Calif. search engine for people, launches tomorrow after a year of suspense. — It has remained secretive for months (see our original coverage), testing its engine, adding some 100,000 profiles and inserting other social networking features. [...]
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[...] has been highly acclaimed by a lot of people but it seems that their launch didn’t go so well. Even their own blog [...]
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I’m not so sure about Spock: The next Riya? « TechFold said:
[...] there’s the problem. It seems to me that people search is a fundamentally niche market. While 30% of search volume may be people related, how much of that volume is monetizeable, and does Spock add enough marginal value to grab any of [...]
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Pilgrim’s Picks for August 8 said:
[...] It’s been in beta for a while but today Spock, the people search engine, publicly launches. [...]
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GigaOM What’s on GigaNET Today « said:
[...] VentureBeat: People Search start-up Spock Launches. [...]
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[...] a search engine focused on finding people, launched out of invitation-only beta today. I haven’t mentioned Spock much here in the past. But [...]
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Dan Blank: Publishing, Innovation & the Web » Blog Archive » The Lack of Context in Search said:
[...] of other companies (other than Google, that is) who are working on this. One recent launch is Spock, a search engine for people: “Here’s a way Spock differs from Google: Type “boxer” into Spock, and its top search [...]
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New Breed of People Search Engine Launches: Spock.com : Natural Search Blog said:
[...] (VentureBeat’s writeup on Spock is worth reading, and I see that Greg Sterling just mentioned Spock on Search Engine Land a few minutes ago, too.) Technorati Tags: people search, privacy, privacy concerns, spock, white pages [...]
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correlate » Blog Archive » Spock Launches Public Beta said:
[...] processing technology came out of private alpha and made itself available to the world. A good write-up from VentureBeat. One can tell that they are heading into a compelling direction even in the face [...]
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Spock Launches To Public « iBrian said:
[...] to VentureBeat, Spock "has a chance to steal searchers from Google. About 30 percent of searches on Google [...]
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links for 2007-08-13 « David Black said:
[...] People search engine Spock launches - VentureBeat “It has remained secretive for months… testing its engine, adding some 100,000 profiles and inserting other social networking features.” (tags: internet socialmedia vertical search people) [...]
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yasni Blog » Blog Archive » Wie oft nutze ich yasni? Ein Selbsterfahrungsbericht. said:
[...] selten. Ist das bei Personensuche auch so? Berater-Hype und kein Nutzen? Angeblich sollen bis zu 30% der Suchanfragen auf Google personenbezogen sein. Wie ist es bei “mir”, einem ganz normalen yasni-Nutzer (PS: Ich [...]