People search engine Spock, which we’ve been covering for a few months, has publicly launched.
Spock differs from differs from recently launched WikiYou and other people search engines by using algorithms to find and merge the majority of their content into a unified profile. User generated content such (tags, links, photos) then augment the auto-generated content they spider from other sources such as wikipedia, IMDB, or social networking sites.
Note that competitor Wink seems to be moving toward a more automated model as well. They recently crossed 200 million people profiles and have been incorporating some of the same data sources as Spock.
A key Spock feature is a widget that shows results for a given tag (see embed below). Making the service public makes the widget a lot more useful. You can use it to make any number of lists around a how Spock ranks search terms. See, for example, the results for blogger and tech blogger.
Spock is certainly fun, and encourages user interaction by adding and voting on descriptive tags. It could easily become a definitive source of information about people. It will, however, likely take a massive number of page views to properly monetize the product - people searches do not generate the kind of advertising rates that ecommerce and other searches command.
Ups, Spock is off… BTW, Nick you forgot the embed below
Nick, it is not working, the link didn’t work. I tried to do the search myself for tech blogger, it gives the following:
“Uh Oh
Looks like we’re having problems right now. Try coming back in a bit.”
Spock should be ready before they say they are.
Looks like Spock isn’t ready for all the traffic. At first I got an error message, then just a blank page. Cool service though, I enjoyed it during the invitational beta.
I opted to sign up to Spock by providing mail address , received invite to same , started sign up process , got to point of giving Spock access to G-mail address book and then was teleported to page bearing error message and asking me for Spock password I had not set …
We have a problem Captain, it seems Spock does not compute…
(also hope the app hasnt totally weirded out and spammed all my contacts ..).
Uh oh state .. spooky
broken, broken, broken. ho hum.
I got an early invite to Spock some months ago.
I think there’s a lot going for Spock, what with the democratic tagging, and the fact that anyone can update your profile.
Which has obvious implications with regards to accuracy, personal branding sabotage et cetera.
But then so does Wikipedia, which doesn’t do too bad on the whole…
That’s it Nick. Now we know what you look like and who your mates are. http://www.spock.com/user33s09.....k4s6503376
Scary
Spock’s an interesting look at how individuals can be found online, I’ve an exclusive text based interview with one of the co-founders.
Find out WHY this is so important
http://www.web-strategist.com/.....o-founder/
As of 9AM on the East Coast still REALLY lagging. You can mill around, but prepare to get TO’d.
The problem I have with Spock is that in order to “claim” my own profile I need to provide Spock with my LinkedIn username and password, so that they can verify my identity. Why would I want to do this?
I realize they need some form of identity verification but if the only way they can do this is to ask me to expose my private data, that’s a problem. Why is it so important for me to claim my Spock profile that I would be willing to reveal my confidential details to them?
Kind regards,
Evan Rudowski
it’s up. but it’s slower than molasses running uphill in january during a snowstorm.
hmmmm…it is a bit slow. you can do better Spock team!
Unusable.
I am disappointed to see John Dvorak missing the top 5. He is the man!
And … it seems that something making a call to the Spock.com site is making the whole techcrunch.com site hangup … it just took like a minute to pull in this comment page. And the TC homepage hung up for like 30 seconds … and, yes, I’m on a good wi-fi connection. Nick - you might see what you’re pulling from them and chunk it until they get their ducks in a row. Hate to see you guys get punished for their ineptitude.
CWR
uh, spock blows chunks…been in the beta for a while, and reviewed them for part of an upcoming article in CI Magazine…the whole idea fails…
spock is the mahalo of people search, and mahalo sucks even harder….
I enjoyed using Spock when it was in private beta. But truthfully, I’m not sure, however, what distinct purpose this network will fill.
As an educator, I would love to see a network like Spock cater to students doing research projects. It would be a very cool research tool. Teachers could, for example, ask students to compare the way that different people might respond to the same issue.
I suggest you guys edit this blog entry quick. The inline link to spock is almost bring your whole front page down (it took a couple minutes to load).
This asking for your LinkedIn info thing is kind of unacceptable. And that’s once you get past the error messages.
Again, Interesting Idea, not sure the market is ready for this product. Plus, who is the target market on this?
What a joke! They’ve been on beta for months and months and now they publicly launch with broken site?
After trying numerous times to bring on their home page, I tried a few searches for not so well known people and got zero results. Similar searches for people on google returns multiple results. I think their width and depth of ‘people crawl’ is woefully inadequate as compared to what’s available in google.
7 million dollars, a management team that looks good on paper plus lots of buzz should not be so disappointing. Zoominfo returns better results.
Yeesh, the signup process is lame too. A million steps and then it kicks you into a login page before you’ve chosen or received a password. Back to real work.
7 million in angel round.
I dont about Spock, I think its laim but I want to get deeper into it before i make my final judgement
Status: 500 Internal Server Error Content-Type: text/html
Uh Oh
Looks like we’re having problems right now. Try coming back in a bit.
This is really embarressing for any startups. You are kidding right?!?!? People see your website that cost $ 7 million dollars to make.
Please use good judgement before you get VC funding.
People might end up seeing
1. Development hell
2. Vaporware
3. Problmes.
You can only get one PR deals: Business week, Wall street journal, other publication. Journalist only write once.
I suggest you bring back “Come back next time! We are working on it” and cancel all the running press. It can hurt your company’s reputations and employment futures.
Uh, I think the spock widget embedded in this post is slowly down TechCrunch’s main page?
$7M idea for mainly searching LinkedIn and Wikipedia? Can you put me in touch with your VC? I will only blow their $100K.
Sucks. Mad slow.
Yeah, since the site has gone public I’ve been experiencing the slowdown and had some errors when switching to the grid format.
I have been using spock from its beta launch. I am sure, it will make its mark very soon.
Rajesh Shakya
http://www.rajeshshakya.com
Helping technopreneurs to excel and lead their life!
The site is too slow!
Still broken. Someone should have been paying their pr people less and their engineers more.
I use beta version of site and even when fast, not very good. Not sure why they get so much blog posting.
No better (maybe worse) than other sites (pipl.com / zoominfo.com). Somebody friends with somebody.
Dear Techcrunch readers,
After a very successful private beta, we launched the Spock public beta today with great fanfare. During the private beta period we created a strong community of users, bloggers, and reviewers. For this we are very grateful.
In anticipation of our public beta launch, we had catered for peak capacity of 100 page views a second, which translates to 300 million page views a month. However, since this morning we have been getting a consistent request rate of 300 to 400 page views a second, which translates to nearly 1 billion page views a month.
Although this level of demand is gratifying, we sincerely apologize for not being able to serve it all, and appreciate everyone’s patience. The entire Spock team is working hard to add more capacity today and tomorrow. Please bear with us while we add more bandwidth to meet the needs of our global user base.
Sincerely,
Jaideep Singh
Co-founder & CEO
Ok have been messing around with it for a bit and I have made up my mind that i think its totally laim.
Really disappointing actually i was hoping for something great.
It really is substandard and boring
You can’t go alive with such a lot of errors.. Pls this’s not acceptable.
I think the basic idea of a vertical search engine targeting humans is promising. It will also require the Spock team to execute flawlessly( today’s public beta was a counter example ), as there are good competitors in this space, and user’s taste and preferences are ever evolving.
Jaideep,
You need to slow down on the hype. The bigger problem, Spock does not seem to have a strong value prop.
Best wishes!
And here I thought you were going to announce something exciting…Like a new, real search engine.
Jaideep,
Now I understand the problem with your site and probably your company… if you design a site for 100 PV/sec that does not equate to 300MM per month. As all sites have some peak to average ratio so 100 PV/sec design is probably more like 50MM PV per month.
By your comment above, it sounds like you are suggesting that you are now tracking to 1B… spin baby spin.
You just got crunched. Don’t go buy some servers as I don’t think you will see the load you saw today for a while, if ever.
Spock has a real problem with being able to differentiate between multiple instances of the same person, and completely different people.
I plugged a friend’s name into Spock and saw 5 results — 4 different profiles of the friend, plus one profile of another person who happens to share his name.
Lame.
i really admire onething about spock…they got so much PR (wonder how much they spent on hyping it)….time will tell if spock is a viable business or not!
Jaideep, stop spending VC money on your PR and start outsourcing your infrastructure to others that know what they are doing. for God’s sake, you are still using 1and1 for your hosting and resolving….they are doing everything in best effort basis, i use them for my personal site and i still have problem…either build your own or give it up to industry leaders!
system admin 101
Spock seems to be offline…
http://www.spock.com:
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable