Spock (website)

Spock is a vertical search engine or entity search engine on people. The name "Spock" is explained with a backronym: "single point of contact (by) keyword."[2] Founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh, it has "indexed over 250 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records."[3] These records are 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 maintains that "30% of all Internet searches are people-related".[4]

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
Alexa rank 483,187 (April 2014)[1]
Registrationoptional
Launched2006
Current statusactive

As entity resolution is the main algorithmic hurdle of their indexing endeavour, Spock has issued and awarded the Spock Challenge Prize. The winning entry combines various machine learning algorithms.[5]

Spock opened its service to public beta on August 8, 2007.[6]

Financing

In December 2006, Spock raised $7 million in a Series A round of funding from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital.[7]

On April 30, 2009, Spock was acquired by Intelius.[8]

gollark: It also turns out they have a very permissive character set.
gollark: Yes. Yes it is.
gollark: And then apparently entirely mucked up security.
gollark: I really wonder who thought it was a good and useful idea to make a website where you could share your pronouns and follow other people's pronouns or whatever.
gollark: No.

References
  1. "Spock.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
  2. Spock Joins Crowded People Search Space Archived 2007-08-11 at the Wayback Machine
  3. http://www.spock.com/do/pages/pr_web_expo
  4. Exclusive Screenshots: Spock’s New People Engine by Michael Arrington
  5. Weighted Experts: A Solution for the Spock Data Mining Challenge
  6. Spock Open Public Beta by Nick Gonzalez
  7. CrunchBase Company Information: Spock
  8. Intelius buys Spock
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