Google’s recent enhancements around people search are a great validation of the importance of people search. We are excited to see Google making a strategic move here, and expect that their competitors will follow suit quickly.
People search presents unique challenges, and requires unique solutions. While a universal search approach can be useful for meeting some needs, We believes that the Spock approach will provide a more compelling experience for finding information about people by an order of magnitude.
The Spock approach is unique for several reasons:
1. People are more than a name on Spock – Spock allows you to search for people based on the context of how you know them, not just their name. This creates a much richer and more gratifying user experience.
2. Documents relate to people, not keywords – General search engines like Google serve up web documents without organizing them around a specific person (this makes common name search really hard – i.e. which John Smith is the one from my high school, etc). Spock, on the other hand, organizes information around the person, not the keyword. This makes for a cleaner experience and allows the user to clearly see which documents are about which person.
3. Information can come from the web or from People – Spock understands that most of the information available about people is not online today, and thus needs to come from community contributions. On Spock, users can help define how results are presented and search relevance.
4. Privacy –Personally identifiable information should never be discoverable about you on the web without your consent. Spock allows people to claim ownership of their result, and manage private information about them.
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October 11th, 2007 at 11:56 am
[...] Barry Schwartz wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerptGoogle’s recent enhancements around people search are a great validation of the importance of people search. We are excited to see Google making a strategic move here, and expect that their competitors will follow suit quickly. … [...]
October 11th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
1. Can’t this be done on Facebook / MySpace / etc through school, corporate, and regional networks?
2. Wouldn’t a Google search for “John Smith, Kennedy High School, Fairfax, VA” solve this problem?
3/4 – The people that *want* to be found setup profiles, blogs, web pages, etc. If they don’t, they either use the privacy options those sites provide or don’t participate in them.
I just do not see the compelling reason we need search engines that specialize in finding people. I’d like to be convinced otherwise since a lot of companies and VCs apparently disagree.
October 11th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Hi Adam – thanks for your questions, let me see if I can answer them.
1. If a social network like Facebook or MySpace grows big enough, then people search is a by-product that you get. However, even if one of these sites were to have 300 million users, that still is not even 5% of the world’s population. Our mission is to index everyone in the world. This includes famous people, normal people, historical people. Furthermore, while on some social networks you can search by school / work, that does not mean that you get all the results back – it will not be comprehensive. To add to that, you are limited on those terms. At Spock, we want you to be able to go to and search for people who were US presidents and left handed.. The types of Searches you could do on Spock are unlimited.
2. I did a google search for “John Smith, Kennedy High School, Fairfax, VA” and all the result I got back was pretty poor – the second result was of someone else named Kristen. Google is really good at document search, but people search requires a different set of technology and thinking. Even when I clicked in more details, I did not get the right result with Google Base.
3. There is a big disconnect between people who dont have the time to create blogs, social sites, etc vs. them not wanting to be found. We have a lot of doctors, dentists and real-estate agents on Spock who do not have much of a web presence, but REALLY like the fact that people can find them when you type in “doctor, san diego” in Spock. People do want to be found, as long as the way you find them is meaningful to them “looking for a doctor, lawyer, etc”
The vision of Spock is to index everyone so that we can help you find and organize everyone in your life.
Hope this helps
Jay
October 11th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt [...]
October 11th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Is this a 100% opt-in thing? I mean, you don’t intend to index people who haven’t explicitly signed up do you?
October 12th, 2007 at 12:38 am
There is some info at http://www.spock.com/do/pages/help . It doesn’t appear to be a strictly opt-in system. It appears there is harvesting from social networking sites and other sources. I think I read something about it inviting new users to import contacts from online address books they use(!). I think I also read that said contacts are spammed with invites unless the new user opts-out of that. So it sounds like any clueless and inconsiderate person you know could compromise you, your email address, and your relationship(s). So if privacy, business relationships, or whatever are of concern to you it would probably be best if you spread word that there are sites like this (don’t point people to them of course) and inform people so they know to avoid them and/or know they should never… EVER… upload contacts or otherwise contribute information about their relationships without permission from the other parties. Corporations should of course block access to the site.
October 12th, 2007 at 1:52 am
Hi Anon – I believe that either you must be wrongly informed or work for one of our so called competitors:)
To elaborate on your points.
1. We NEVER email anyone that you may scan from your address book without your express permission. I welcome you to go through our sign-up process and see that we double confirm with you if you really want us to invite people from your address book to Spock.
2. We NEVER reveal email addresses of anyone. Unlike google or other so called people search engines, we do not display personally identifiable informaton like your email, phone, or home address. Even if that information is publically available on the internet, we do not display it. It’s our policy that such information should be controlled by the person.
3. We do not harvest social networks or any such word you use. We crawl the entire web with the same policy and standards of any other search engine. We honor all robots.txt files and follow all generally accepted crawling princliples.
I wish that you would take a tour of Spock and see our policy on how we educate users on Internet privacy and our policy around personal information.
October 12th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
[...] Google’s People Search – Spock speaks out, Alt Search Engines [...]
October 12th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
[...] Google’s People Search – Spock speaks out, Alt Search Engines [...]
October 20th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]
October 23rd, 2007 at 6:04 am
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January 5th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
[...] Google’s People Search – Spock speaks out, Alt Search Engines [...]