A general search engine like Google is okay for many kinds of searches, and may even be quite good in certain areas, but it can’t compare with a specialized search engine in its area of expertise. So argue medical search engines, job hunting sites, and now people search engines. Today we’ll look at Spock, a people search engine that’s still in private beta, to see if it helps us find people better than Google.
It's been estimated that 30 percent of searches online are for people. How well do we find who we're looking for? That probably depends on how obscure the person is. For example, I share my name with a singer, a baseball player, an artist, an actor who also works as a set designer, and - perhaps most disturbingly - another writer who has written about computers and the Internet. Still, I can be found on the first page of Google. I can't say the same thing for our much more accomplished CTO, Rich Smith.
These days though, a lot of people use Google to research prospective employees, dates, tenants, what have you. Online, it's easy enough to mistake one person for another. If you happen to share a common name like Smith, or a particularly famous name as Josh Clark writing for Global Moxie pointed out, you're not going to show up high in Google's search results. There will be pages of other Smiths, or pages of sites devoted to your celebrity doppelganger.
Enter Spock. I first started hearing about this people search engine in early April. At the time they were just starting to receive financing; they're currently funded by Clearstone Venture Partners (who have also funded the likes of Overture and PayPal) and Opus Capital Ventures. Spock is still in private beta, so I had to content myself with reading reviews by Josh Clark and Tim O'Reilly while waiting for the invitation I'd requested.
I'm pleased to say I finally received that invitation, so for the first time I'm getting to look at something before all of the rest of the world has seen it. So fasten your seat belts; we're checking this ship out from stem to stern.
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