Today i got the beta invitation from Spock to check their search engine. Spock is a silicon valley based startup founded by Jaideep Singh and Jay Bhatti, focussed on people search.
Spock is different from other search engines, it indexes people information from the web. Spock claims that they have already indexed 100 million people. Spock uses the community sites like wikipedia, linkedin, myspace and others to built its search results about people. People are tagged with keywords extracted from community sites, users can tag their own and others profiles and vote on others tags up and down to strengthen search relevancy.
I have 3 invites 430 Invitations left, if you want to test Spock, drop a comment or email me.
Once you login with your email ID, spock runs it through various social network sites to see if it is attached to any profile, if it finds profiles you can claim them or skip. Spock finds relationships between people, it will display related results based on user profiles.
Spock results are displayed in List view and Grid view (View Screenshots).
The product is still in beta but do far the results are impressive, a search for “Technology” term gives authoritative results with Bill Gates in the first place followed by Micheal Arrington and Steve Jobs. I would expect steve jobs to be on second position, but more number of people use it then the results may change.
A search for “blogger” term yeilds results with bloggers like Micheal Arrington, Tim O’Reilly, Robert Scoble, Om Malik and Anil Dash. (View Screenshots).
You can embed Spock widget with your profile information on your blog or myspace profile.
Screenshots (Click on images for larger view)
Image: Spock Home Page
Image: Search term “Technology”: List View
Image: Micheal Arrington profile
Image: Search term “Blogger”: Grid View
Yep, get me one invite!
@Benedict
Invite sent
I can’t wait to test this out. If you have an invite, please send me. Thanks 🙂
Thanks, Ram. Just got it.
@Shankar
Invite sent
I got 430 Invitations for Spock.
I have sent to all my commentators, if you didn’t receive drop me a comment.
Does anyone know how to get their profile up on Spock?
Once you follow the invite link, you will be asked to claim your profiles of social networking site like Myspace, Linked in etc, you can skip this step and directly go to your profile. You will see a link with your name, click on that to edit your profile. Profile editing is ajaxified and it takes a few secs. Your profile is already there, i will send you the link.
yep.. I did the same. but does that mean my profile would be available for public search ? 😉
@benedict,
good point, i didn’t check this way. I did a search with my email ID, it shows no results and advice me to invite him. This may be a bug or some more info is needed to enable searchble profile.
Im am very interested in trying this new search engine
@Joe
Invite sent
@Benedict
I posted about this on spock blog, this is what they said