After much hype and coverage in the tech world, people-search engine Spock launched earlier today in open-beta form. Founded in 2006, the site claims to have indexed over 100 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records, including those from public social networking sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, and Friendster.

According to the company, 30% of internet searches are people related. In order to tap this search sub-market, Spock utilizes algorithms that pull together content on specific people from their online public profiles and other people-search engines. The engine also takes existing content on bigger sites like Wikipedia or IMDB.com to round out the data.

To feed their people-search index, Spock asks users to add tags, photos, and links, to the original pulled data. Users can vote tags up or down, affecting the popularity of the tag and thereby how high it ranks as an adjective describing the person it is attached to. This adds a community feel to the search engine, and ensures that, given enough users, the community’s ‘real’ opinion on each individual will surface.  In this way, Spock leverages user-generated voting to determine relevancy.

Spock Chief Executive Jaideep Singh plans to gain revenue by serving ads next to searches (a la Google), although the company will wait a few months before doing so, probably timing it to coincide with Spock coming out of public beta. Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch muses on what is likely to be an initial problem for Spock, however:

“Spock is certainly fun, and encourages user interaction by adding and voting on descriptive tags. It could easily become a definitive source of information about people. It will, however, likely take a massive number of page views to properly monetize the product – people searches do not generate the kind of advertising rates that ecommerce and other searches command.”

On a final note, Spock users can “claim” their name and upload pictures, friend others etc…. all of which will affect the search results tied to their name. All this makes Spock a very interesting mix between a search engine and social networking tool. We’ll have to keep an eye on the beta (it’s been running extremely slowly today) and see how popular it becomes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Search: Innovations, Search: News, Social Media, Tagging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.