Spock - People Search vertical goes live

By Vivek | August 8th, 2007 at 04:44 am ET         

After months in private beta, people search engine Spock is going live today. To start with, Spock is competing with the likes of Wikiyou.com, and Zoominfo, and also with other professional networking sites including LinkedIn and Xing

Motivation behind the vertical search build-out comes from the fact that estimated 20 billion search queries about people run everyday. According to BusinessWeek, “Spock is trying to capture some of the more than $60 billion that is projected to be spent on search marketing over the next four years.” While estimates are estimates, even if Spock gets a fraction of the projected market size, it should be good enough for them. T

Search experience is better at Spock as compared to Google/Yahoo/Ask, since information is organized around a specific individual. For example, when you type “boxer” into Spock, the top search results are Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson. As compared to that, the top boxer search result on Google returns a Wikipedia entry for a “boxer” dog. Wonder who shows up on the top for the keyword - “blogger”

Spock is already indexing public information for each and every person on the face…. If you want to personalize your profile, you can upload your own photos and tags and so on. And just like any new launch, social play is never far behind. You can click on the star next to the person’s name and they will be added to favorites, so you can do future searches within your saved favorites only.