Spock People Search

Recently I have got an invitation (thanks to Ben Metcalfe) for people search engine Spock which is still in private beta. There are not many people search engines around at the moment; so I was curious how Spock works. The other ones I am aware of are ZoomInfo and Wink. There are more companies but those seem to focus more on profile aggregation than on search. If you know any other real people search engine leave a comment, please.

Features

Users can search for people either by names – email addresses work as well – or by tags. There is an advanced search available (see screenshot) which provides even more options.

Unlike known search engines like Google Spock is displaying just one search result for each person which makes searching rather comfortable because you don’t have to look through several result pages just to come across the same person time and again. One entry = one person. Search results also feature tags, a short biography from Wikipedia, LinkedIn or other sites and – if available – a photo, related people (=family, colleagues,…), and websites. So ideally you will get a good summary of a person which should be sufficient for a first impression.

Here is the entry for Siemens CEO Klaus Kleinfeld:

Registered users can add more tags and websites to each search result and they can even vote on existing tags and photos which will hopefully improve forthcoming searches.

Problems

Spock is trying to scan the web for information on people which will probably take some more weeks or even months before it will be finished. At the moment I don’t find any of my close friends on Spock; I don’t even find myself there although I have a Spock account and I am registered with various Web 2.0 services. One problem seems to be location – most of my friends are in Germany -, the other one might be the umlaut in my last name which is not supported by Spock. I have tried Carsten Pötter, Carsten Poetter and also Carsten Potter: no results.

Although the search result for Klaus Kleinfeld is providing a good summary it doesn’t offer more information than the Wikipedia entry for Mr Kleinfeld. The summary is from Wikipedia anyway, also Wikipedia is included in the list of relevant websites. What’s worse, two of the five links are leading to a site where I have to sign up. That’s really unnecessary. Wouldn’t it be easier to go to Wikipedia straight away if I was searching for celebrities?

Summary

Nevertheless Spock is an interesting approach to people search and it will certainly improve when the web will be scanned completely and more people use the service, tag people, and add relevant websites to search results. Spock just has to iron out some rough edges and should pay attention to the possibility of gaming the search results.

I have 101 invitations for Spock, so go and test it for yourself. Just leave a comment with a valid email address.

The usual disclosure: I did some beta testing for the Wink widget. Spock and Wink are competitors