Spock was a U.S. search website specialized in finding people; also known as a
vertical search engine or entity search engine. The name "Spock" is a
backronym: "single point of contact (by) keyword." Founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh, it "indexed over 250 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records." These records were from publicly available sources, including Wikipedia,
IMDb,
ESPN,
LinkedIn,
Hi5,
MySpace,
Friendster,
Facebook,
YouTube,
Flickr,
Twitter, corporate biographies, university faculty and staff pages, real estate agents sites, school alumni and member directory pages, etc. The company maintained that "30% of all Internet searches are people-related".
As
entity resolution
Record linkage (also known as data matching, data linkage, entity resolution, and many other terms) is the task of finding records in a data set that refer to the same entity across different data sources (e.g., data files, books, websites, and da ...
is the main algorithmic hurdle of their indexing endeavour, Spock issued and awarded the Spock Challenge Prize. The winning entry combines various
machine learning algorithms.
Spock opened its service to public beta on August 8, 2007.
On April 30, 2009, Spock was acquired by
Intelius.
Intelius buys Spock
/ref>
References
External links
Spock - People SearchSpock - the People Search Engine
Co-founder, Jay Bhatti, interviewed by Stan Relihan o
The Connections Show
(audio podcast)
by Tim O'Reilly
Internet search engines
Internet properties established in 2006
{{ict-company-stub