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." Founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh, it has "indexed over 250 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records." These records are from publicly available sources, including Wikipedia, IMDB, ESPN, LinkedIn, Hi5, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Twitter, FEC, 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".

As entity resolution is the main algorithmic hurdle of their indexing endeavour, Spock has issued and awarded the Spock Challenge Prize.

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

Financing

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

On April 30, 2009, Spock was acquired by Intelius.

References

External links

• Co-founder, Jay Bhatti, interviewed by Stan Relihan on (audio podcast)
• by Tim O'Reilly

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