Spock (website)

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."[1] Founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh, it "indexed over 250 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records."[2] 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".[3]

Spock Networks, Inc.
Screenshot of spock.com
Type of businessPrivate
Type of site
Search engine
Available inEnglish
Founded2006
HeadquartersRedwood City, California
Key peopleJaideep Singh, Co-founder/CEO
Jay Bhatti, Co-founder/VP product
Hongche Liu, Chief Information Architect
URLwww.spock.com
Registrationoptional
Launched2006
Current statusactive

As entity resolution 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.[4]

Spock opened its service to public beta on August 8, 2007.[5]

On April 30, 2009, Spock was acquired by Intelius.[6]

References
  1. Spock Joins Crowded People Search Space Archived 2007-08-11 at the Wayback Machine
  2. http://www.spock.com/do/pages/pr_web_expo
  3. Exclusive Screenshots: Spock’s New People Engine by Michael Arrington
  4. Weighted Experts: A Solution for the Spock Data Mining Challenge
  5. Spock Open Public Beta by Nick Gonzalez
  6. Intelius buys Spock


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