Recently I published an article on my site which posed the following topic: Wikia search engine. But we were disappointed as it works to many reasons. So, today when another search engine come onto my radar, I was overly excited.
Spock.com – the best people search on the Web doesn’t provide results for the entire web—it only provides search results about people. It currently into public beta, and after several months of private testingand prides itself in providing the “richest people search experience on the web.”
What is Spock?
Spock is a free people and information search engine that takes information on people from all across the Web and organizes it in an easy to search format. People can be searched by name, e-mail or by a “tag” -a more personal piece of information (e.g. lawyer, web developer, blind, curly hair, etc).
These tags can be created by the user themselves, or by other Spock members. Opinions can be voiced about a person by voting on a tag or picture. Within a search result are links to a person’s other locations on the web (e.g. MySpace, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, blog, etc).
In addition we released a Trust Network which allows you to personalize your search so that any Spock connection you have will show up first-even if it’s within an extended network of your friends (ie if you searched for Physicist- rather than Isaac Newton being first, your physicist friend would).
I wanted to talk about this search engine because it performs a unique function that is well particular than that current search engines. Spock is a people search application that stores information about you. Some of the main features offered with the new Spock include:
- You can search for a specific person,
- you can search person for a topic,
- The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds,
- It also lets users add tags of their own,
- It lets users vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics.
Users can also find friend, upload pictures, and provide other details and information them. This is definitely a site that will get better as more people use it and one of my key tests for Web 2.0. It also show a new way to use a search engine: using programs to populate a database, and people to improve it.
I tried to search “Larry page” as keyword. Being an important guys (co-founded the Google internet search engine) he located in the first position on the list before to other importants larry page there. Sure, compare to Google, Spack provides still an mechanisms for ranking people are in early stage, but spock show a simple top-level summary collected in one site.
Spock.com – the best people search on the Web provides many of features for the users as the possibility to see included a picture, in the search result list, and if you click on the name, you have more information about user.
Through a little wikipedia widget, you can also add more information about your profile, a great way to update your profile when you want. Spok offer a solution that includes details information, Wikipedia system a picture, tag describing his career, link to web sites associated with him an much more.
For now Spock is just an promise, but I am very excited by the excellent work that the Spock guys have done this is a company with a clear vision and an impressive service easy to use.
