Spock was a U.S. search website specialized in finding people; also known as a

vertical search engine A vertical search engine is distinct from a general web search engine, in that it focuses on a specific segment of online content. They are also called specialty or topical search engines. The vertical content area may be based on topicality, media ...

or entity search engine. The name "Spock" is a

backronym A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...

: "single point of contact (by) keyword." Founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh, it "indexed over 250 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records." These records were from publicly available sources, including Wikipedia,

IMDb IMDb (an abbreviation of Internet Movie Database) is an online database of information related to films, television series, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, ...

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). Th ...

LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job se ...

Hi5 hi5 is an American social networking service based in San Francisco, California. It is owned by The Meet Group. Users can create a profile and provide personal information including interests, age, photos, and hometown. Users can also send f ...

, MySpace,

Friendster Friendster was a social network game based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003.Eric Eldon, August 4, 2008.Friendster raises $20 million, nabs a Googler to be CEO VentureBeat. Retrieved December 4, 2 ...

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, corporate biographies, university faculty and staff pages, real estate agents sites, school alumni and member directory pages, etc. The company maintained that "30% of all Internet searches are people-related". As entity resolution is the main algorithmic hurdle of their indexing endeavour, Spock issued and awarded the Spock Challenge Prize. The winning entry combines various

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

algorithms. Spock opened its service to public beta on August 8, 2007. On April 30, 2009, Spock was acquired by

Intelius Intelius, Inc. is a public records business headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It provides information services, including people and property search, background checks and reverse phone lookup. Users also have the ability to p ...

.Intelius buys Spock
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References

External links

Spock - People SearchSpock - the People Search Engine
Co-founder, Jay Bhatti, interviewed by Stan Relihan o
The Connections Show
(audio podcast)

by

Tim O'Reilly Tim O'Reilly (born 6 June 1954) is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0. Education and early life Born in County Cork, Ireland, Tim O'Reilly moved to San Francisco, C ...

Internet search engines Internet properties established in 2006 {{ict-company-stub