People search

01/08/2007

According to Spock, the online leader in personal search, more than 30% of queries on Google and Yahoo involve users looking up information about other people.

"Single Point Of Contact by Keyword" (as it's also known), focuses on trawling content in social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook, taking tags from these profiles and focusing on what type of content exists about a person.

With a goal to eventually index all people, Spock has a long way to go. So far only 100 million people have been indexed. Talking about the aims of the site, co-founder Jay Bhatti, said: "Spock is a search engine that organizes information around people… We're trawling the Web to find documents, and then organizing and ranking that information around an entity."

The more popular the person, generally the higher they rank. For instance, footballer Michael Owen ranks ahead of the Rugby player who has the same name (http://www.spock.com/q/michael-owen), and there are several other Michael Owens after that.

The two main groups who are interested in Spock are recruiters and employers looking for data, based on pre-launch testing. But if you've got a profile up somewhere, chances are you may be in the list.

The site offers you the option of searching by keyword if you don't know the full name of the person you're looking for or if you're looking for any person in particular.

Not surprisingly, top terms searched for were names of celebrities.

 

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