Scopetech

Before all you Trekkies get overly excited - we’re talking about the latest in searching for people online with Spock. On a basic level, Spock is a people search engine that allows you to search for people and information about them based on what the site has indexed. All of this sounds intrusive but the more I think about it the more it becomes clear: this could actually be a very useful tool in today’s web culture.

I had to try this out for myself so after some time waiting on my invite I was able to give the site a look. Sign in was quick and the interface was pretty basic, seeming simple enough to use and luckily it functions exactly as you would imagine. The first thing I did was what I assume anyone using the service will do: search for myself, and it gave me the information I put in when I signed up. The way this works is most of its information comes from indexing information online and obviously with celebrities having more information out there, their Spock results have significantly more detail. Of course if you don’t turn up on the results you can enter your own information on your profile which then gets listed within the site.

There is really only one kind of search result you get from Spock, lists upon lists of people. They seem to have results for literally every kind of query. So whether you search names, locations, dates or anything you get a list of people related to the query. It even allows tags and relationships to be attributed to queries as well as links associated with whatever you searched for. How does all of this work? Simply by indexing information from websites in the same way Google does. There is also an option to add websites, tags and relationships yourself.

Now this is already a pretty neat service as it is but what I see here are a lot of possibilities among the many networks we have online. With social networking being the main focus here, if a site like this was to merge with another social network such as Facebook, Twitter or Pownce it could be the ultimate social networking tool. You could quickly and easily find a friend and add them to all the various networks and from there find their brother, sister, cousin or any of their friends. With the addition of WHOIS information, blogs and more social networks Spock could effectively have results for everyone listed online making it the most efficient ‘people search engine’ on the web.

Spock really does have a lot of potential and with the constantly growing social networks of today’s web culture it could expand to much more, the beta service is already pretty good but unfortunately isn’t pulling enough information for you to find much more than you can find with a quick Google Search. Keep an eye on it, it’s definitely a service worth checking out.

We’re giving away invitations to Spock.com, leave a comment, include your email address and we’ll send you an invite.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Reviews, Web Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.