Spock searches for people on the Internet

Posted in on 20 January 2008

Spock logoSpock is a relative newcomer on the search engine scene. It provides people-based searching combined with elements of social networking and other modern website practices like tagging and voting. By signing up to Spock, you can 'claim' your search results which can allow you to shape what people see when they search for your name.

Spock ("single point of contact by keyword") takes an interesting idea ("people searches are a third of all Internet searches") and has developed it into a 'niche' search engine. By providing a list of people-based results, it should be quite easy to find the person you want.

Spock provides the expected pared-down search box interface and searching a person's name, keyword or location gives a list of profiles. Usually, these are different people with the same name. Each profile has different information, links and tags, associated with it. In most cases, this should enable anyone to find the correct person.

However, in my case, it was disappointing (but perhaps not unexpected) that searching for "clive walker" did not give a profile with 'my results'. I know I am not famous and most of my website work is done under a company name but I expected at least one of the "clive walker" profiles to be me with a few of my personal websites listed1. Oh well.

Despite my results (!), I think that Spock has the potential to be 'big'. It has to compete, at least in part, with other social networking people sites like Facebook and LinkedIn but I think Spock will continue to grow. To quote a popular TV phrase, "it seems logical Captain". Sorry, couldn't resist Star Trek pun.

More: There's a good write-up of Spock on the Guardian website. There's also an entry about Spock the website on Wikipedia.

1 The same Google search for my name gave more relevant results for me.

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