Spock search engine skips the irrelevant
Rachel Konrad, Associated Press
Monday, July 30, 2007
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SAN FRANCISCO - A search engine startup promises to deliver more targeted results on queries about people, whether your ex-girlfriend, the guy from the bar last night, or Paris Hilton.
The idea is to help avoid sorting through the thousands of mostly irrelevant results delivered by the major Internet search companies.
Menlo Park-based Spock Inc. scours sites such as MySpace, Wikipedia, LinkedIn and Flickr and compiles biographies of the living, dead, famous or obscure.
Results often include an individual's photo, age, job title, political or religious affiliations. Members contribute such information about themselves or others, similar to Wikipedia's model of letting anyone contribute.
Spock will launch within a month with a searchable database of 100 million people.
The site relies on public data; if you've never given your age or posted your photo on a blog or other site, that information may not appear on Spock. Nor does it include information stored on sites that require passwords.
But if you've submitted information to an online newsletter or used another networking site, you may already be Spocked.
None of Spock's 30 employees edits. Computer algorithms police the site: Inflammatory or inappropriate items cause user ratings to plummet.
Everything users add or delete can be traced - nothing is anonymous.
To highlight the ingenuity of Spock, co-founder and CEO Jaideep Singh searched for "Boxer."
On Google, the top result is dogs. On Amazon.com, it's underwear. On Spock, it's biographies of California Sen. Barbara Boxer and Muhammad Ali.
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