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]
 Screenshot of spock.com | |
| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
Type of site | Search engine |
| Available in | English |
| Founded | 2006 |
| Headquarters | Redwood City, California |
| Key people | Jaideep Singh, Co-founder/CEO Jay Bhatti, Co-founder/VP product Hongche Liu, Chief Information Architect |
| URL | www.spock.com |
| Registration | optional |
| Launched | 2006 |
| Current status | active |
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]
References
edit- ^ Spock Joins Crowded People Search Space Archived 2007-08-11 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ http://www.spock.com/do/pages/pr_web_expo
- ^ Exclusive Screenshots: Spock’s New People Engine by Michael Arrington
- ^ Weighted Experts: A Solution for the Spock Data Mining Challenge
- ^ Spock Open Public Beta by Nick Gonzalez
- ^ Intelius buys Spock
External links
edit- Spock - People Search
- Spock - the People Search Engine Co-founder, Jay Bhatti, interviewed by Stan Relihan on The Connections Show (audio podcast)
- Why I'm so excited about Spock by Tim O'Reilly
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