Is Spock the Logical Choice for People Search? - Searching With Spock
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Spock is set up to help you "look for all types of people, from famous people like Paris Hilton to people in your own personal network," says the Spock blog. You can search for them by name or use a category or tag, like athlete, celebrity, politician, singer, or even Star Trek actors. And of course you can get as specific as you want (George Bush comes up under a search for "Drunk Driver" for instance). You can even search for people relevant to a particular topic, like search engine optimization (Matt Cutts made it to the top of Spock's list there, to no one's great surprise). Spock populates its index by crawling Wikipedia and various social networking sites. Though it automatically creates tags, users can also add their own tags, and vote on the relevance of those tags.
Here it's worth noting that Spock seems to want very precise terms. When I searched on Star Trek actors, I received only 17 hits, most of them for actors that didn't ring any bells, and only one from the original series (a guest star at that). When I put in the term Star Trek actor, without the "s," it was an entirely different story:
You can't see it because I cropped this image to fit, but I received more than 1000 hits. As is appropriate for a search engine named Spock, Leonard Nimoy is at the top.
I'd like to point out a couple of really cool things about this search result that make it a better search for people than Google. First of all, every hit is one person, and every person is different. If you do a search on the name "William Shatner," for instance, you are NOT going to get 5,000 hits for William Shatner unless they are all different William Shatners - in this case, Shat happens only once. The other really cool thing is that each entry from the search results contains a ton of information you can see before you even click on it, including some of the person's tags, which are clickable and can lead you to other people who share those interests or that occupation. So there's plenty of room for serendipity.
There's one more really neat thing I'd like to show you about the search results before moving on. Right now you see them as a list. In the upper right corner of the results (again, I had to crop) are two clickable words, "List" and "Grid." When you click on Grid, you get this:
So if you're thinking to yourself, "Okay, I know this person was an actor on Star Trek, and I can't remember her name, but I know what she looked like, now who WAS she?!" you can find out more quickly than if you had to look at the full list. The list view shows only 10 people per page, but the grid view shows 40 people per page. And yes, the names under the photos are clickable, so you can go right from the grid to the person's profile.
Before we go to a profile, it's worth noting that the search button offers an advanced option. All you have to do is click on the word "Advanced" just below the search button. An advanced search looks like this:
You can use name or email, tags, location, age range, or gender, and require Spock to give you a picture (all in any combination). It's just another way to get specific about your search and help narrow things down.
Next: Getting a Profile >>
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