When I think of Spock my mind Immediate goes to Star Trek’s most famous of Vulcans, Mr. Spock played by the venerable actor Leonard Nimoy. From there my mind wonders to the Star Trek themed pop bank called S.P.O.C.K. (their music is pretty good by the way). I don’t think I would ever think search engine, but that’s exactly what Spock.com is, a search engine. It is a people and information search engine. You can search for your friends, co-workers, models, singers, or even your favorite Star Trek actors like Mr. Nimoy.
Spock says they are not a social networking site yet it certainly acts like one. You can use the site to make your searches without signing up, but if you join you get to contribute to the site and hopefully help improve those search results. You do that by inviting friends to “trust” you and then vote on your tags, any one can add tags to any profile so there is the potential of misguided results due to abuse by the users. I can only hope that people that do sign up and claim their profiles have control over the content people add to their profiles. I would hate to come up in the top results for some thing I am not like republican. The site is still in beta so hopefully all the concerns people have will be addressed. Until then enjoy the new search engine and behave yourself.
The hope is that Spock could become the Google of people searches. But do you think you will be hearing the term “have you Spocked yourself†in place of the now familiar “did you Google yourself†any time soon? I don’t think so. Personally, I have not Googled myself in a long time, but felt the need to see if the Spock results were similar to theirs. And they are pretty darned close especially since the web result portion of Spock.com is pulled directly from Google. So head on over to the site and run a search or two on Spock.com to see where you and your friends stand.
Comments
One response to “Spock What or Who is That?”
Thanks for the write up on Spock. I just wanted to help clarify a few issues that you may have.
By enabling you to claim your own search result, Spock updates you on any changes to your search result, and gives you a higher authority on your own search result. Any Spock user can flag offensive material which then goes under review before being deleted. While there is certainly the capability for abuse, we feel that we’ve taken a number of steps to ensure that it is not likely to happen. This includes a black list of terms that can not be entered due to their offensive nature and likely irrelevance ( I believe George Carlin was able to name eight of them).
Spock is not just for maintaining your reputation, but rather can act as a launching pad for things you may want to promote, such as art work, a blog, your profession, etc.
While Spock will likely not over take Google in terms of search, we do feel that we’re a much more efficient people search.