QuasiPreneur.comSilicon Valley startup Spock aims to refine people search
Silicon Valley startup Spock aims to refine people search
SAN
FRANCISCO—A search engine startup promises to deliver more targeted
results on queries about people, whether it’s your ex-girlfriend, the
guy from the bar last night, or Paris Hilton.
The idea is to help
you avoid sorting through the thousands of results—the vast majority
likely to be irrelevant Web pages—delivered by the major Internet
search companies.
Menlo Park-based Spock Inc. scours sites such
as News Corp.’s MySpace, Wikipedia, LinkedIn and Yahoo Inc.’s Flickr
and compiles biographies of real people—alive, dead, famous or obscure,
from New York to New Delhi.
Results often include an
individual’s photo, age, job title, political or religious
affiliations, and research papers or articles written. Members
contribute such information about themselves or others, similar to
Wikipedia’s model of letting anyone contribute to the online
encyclopedia regardless of expertise.
Spock is gaining 30,000
new members per week in an invitation-only "beta" test mode. It will
launch within a month with a searchable database of 100 million people.
The site relies on public data; if you’ve never given your age
or posted your photo on a blog or other site, that information may not
appear on Spock. Nor does the site include information that’s stored
behind sites that require passwords, such as the popular
social-networking site Facebook.
But if you’ve submitted information to a company or your neighborhood’s online newsletter,
or if you’ve used another networking site, including MySpace, Xanga or Ning, you may already be Spocked.
None
of Spock’s 30 employees is an editor. Computer algorithms police the
site: If you post inflammatory or inappropriate items, your user rating
plummets. Everything users add or delete can be traced back—nothing is
anonymous.
To highlight the ingenuity of Spock, co-founder and
CEO Jaideep Singh searched for "Boxer." On Google, the top result is
dogs—specifically the American Kennel Club site. On Amazon.com, it’s
underwear. On Spock, it’s biographies of California Sen. Barbara Boxer
and former World Heavyweight Champion Muhammad Ali.
