Spock Launches Public Beta

Spock, the well-publicized, people search engine leveraging natural language processing technology came out of private alpha and made itself available to the world.  A good write-up from VentureBeat.  One can tell that they are heading into a compelling direction even in the face of some tough competition ZoomInfo  LinkedIn  are also trying to perfect the way you navigate and search people.  You can read more about them at their blog.

Will Spock be differentiated enough?  Time will tell.  I like what they are doing with crawling the web completely oriented about people and the 30% number being thrown around is definitely providing an interesting market size.  (For those who don’t know, apparently 30% of Google searches are about people).  I also like that Spock allows the user to search bilaterally, meaning I can search for ‘Reggie Bush‘ or ‘USC running back‘.  Did a second search on ‘Dallas Cowboys running back’ and Ron Dayne came up on the first page of results, I’ll have to figure that one?

Once quick comment or piece of constructive feedback is SPEED.  Spock must do something about the speed of their engine and overall service response time.  I have not yet had an experience except for searches like ‘George Bush’ where the response time was not severely delayed.  It would be very unfortunate if they lose momentum on a good idea based on users having a poor initial experience.  One of Google’s key tenets in search success is SPEED.  That is one element (besides people search) that Spock should absolutely take to heart and steal.

Some other coverage:

• Spock Officially Launches People Search Engine
• People search engine Spock opens for business
• Spock’s Search For Earthlings
• Spooky Spock - here come the privacy concerns…