Spock's Search For Earthlings, By Scott Gilbertson

Spock, a new people oriented search engine unveiled its public beta today, but the test seems to be off to a shaky start. At the moment the site times out for most requests, probably due to the massive amount of press and inbound links the release has generated.

With a bit of patience you might be able to get the site to load, or bookmark it for later because Spock already has the gushers gushing.

Like Wink and other people-oriented search sites, Spock isn’t so much interested in documents about people, as you would get when searching Google, but the actual people themselves. Spock’s spiders attempt to crawl the net and then its algorithms aggregate all the data about you into one spot.

The result, in those cases where Spock makes a correct match, are simultaneously impressive — a complete portrait of your total web presence — and thoroughly creepy. When Spock was first announced earlier this year a number of people snickered that stalk would be a better name.

But the truth is, that’s killing messenger. All the data Spock crawls is already out there, but you may be in for a shock the first time you see it all in one place.

Pulling data from social networks — MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and others — Spock then condenses and extracts what it considers the most important information about you — namely your occupation and age, though depending on what you’ve listed on your various accounts, it may have even more details.

From the search results profiles you can then click through to vote for whether or not the information is correct, visit the relevant profile page or add tags to people. Just about anyone can edit information on just about any entry.

If you sign up for Spock, you can claim and manage your own entry or create one if Spock doesn’t yet know about you.

Aside from the slow servers, Spock looks as though it might be genuinely useful — if nothing else it might serve as a wake call for those who don’t realize how little privacy they have left themselves.

Go to Scott's blog entry.

 

The result, in those cases where Spock makes a correct match, are simultaneously impressive — a complete portrait of your total web presence — and thoroughly creepy. When Spock was first announced earlier this year a number of people snickered that stalk would be a better name.

But the truth is, that’s killing messenger. All the data Spock crawls is already out there, but you may be in for a shock the first time you see it all in one place.

Pulling data from social networks — MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and others — Spock then condenses and extracts what it considers the most important information about you — namely your occupation and age, though depending on what you’ve listed on your various accounts, it may have even more details.

From the search results profiles you can then click through to vote for whether or not the information is correct, visit the relevant profile page or add tags to people. Just about anyone can edit information on just about any entry.

If you sign up for Spock, you can claim and manage your own entry or create one if Spock doesn’t yet know about you.

Aside from the slow servers, Spock looks as though it might be genuinely useful — if nothing else it might serve as a wake call for those who don’t realize how little privacy they have left themselves.

Go to Scott's blog entry.