Spock (website)

Spock Networks, Inc.

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
Website| www.spock.com
Registration| optional
Launched| 2006
Current status| active

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]

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
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

## External links

* 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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