Spock (website)
 Screenshot of spock.com | |
| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
Type of site | Search engine |
| Available in | English |
| Founded | 2006 |
| Headquarters | Redwood City, California |
| Key people | Jaideep Singh, Co-founder/CEO Jay Bhatti, Co-founder/VP product Hongche Liu, Chief Information Architect |
| URL | www.spock.com |
| Registration | optional |
| Launched | 2006 |
| Current status | active |
Spock is a vertical search engine or entity search engine on people. The name "Spock" is explained with a backronym: "single point of contact (by) keyword."[2] Founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh, it has "indexed over 250 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records."[3] These records are from publicly available sources, including Wikipedia, IMDB, ESPN, LinkedIn, Hi5, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, FEC[disambiguation needed], corporate biographies, university faculty and staff pages, real estate agents sites, school alumni and member directory pages, etc. The company maintains that "30% of all Internet searches are people-related".[4]
As entity resolution is the main algorithmic hurdle of their indexing endeavour, Spock has issued and awarded the Spock Challenge Prize. The winning entry combines various machine learning algorithms.[5]
Spock opened its service to public beta on August 8, 2007.[6]
Financing
In December 2006, Spock raised $7 million in a Series A round of funding from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital.[7]
On April 30, 2009, Spock was acquired by Intelius.[8]
References
- ^ "Spock.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
- ^ Spock Joins Crowded People Search Space
- ^ http://www.spock.com/do/pages/pr_web_expo
- ^ Exclusive Screenshots: Spock’s New People Engine by Michael Arrington
- ^ Weighted Experts: A Solution for the Spock Data Mining Challenge
- ^ Spock Open Public Beta by Nick Gonzalez
- ^ CrunchBase Company Information: Spock
- ^ Intelius buys Spock
External links
- Spock - People Search
- Spock - the People Search Engine Co-founder, Jay Bhatti, interviewed by Stan Relihan on The Connections Show (audio podcast)
- Why I'm so excited about Spock by Tim O'Reilly
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