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Spock.com hopes to become the Google of people searches

arstechnica.com — People search site Spock.com went into public beta today after being privately tested for several months and claims to already have over 100 million individuals indexed in its databases. Better head over there and see if there's any information about you.

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  • Khook20, on 10/10/2007, -1/+43I've tried a couple of times and the site doesn't seem to be dealing with the influx of people very well with all the internet coverage today...
    • Jrr6415sun, on 10/10/2007, -0/+11i'm trying it now, definitely needs to become faster than 5 min per search if it wants to be the "google" of people
      • thcobbs, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5Depends on what data is spits back out. Searching for people is a big difference than searching for just key words.
      • KarthVader, on 10/10/2007, -1/+8Oh no! I'm on there. Jeebus, I can't believe that I had a friendster account. Well, that is going to be deleted.

        Actually, Spock is kinda creepy.
    • fadetoone, on 10/10/2007, -2/+2Yeah, they better start hoping a bit harder I guess...
    • Razster, on 10/10/2007, -7/+3http://www.spock.com
    • dogstar0125, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2I searched for at least 50 people, and I didn't get a single hit. What a useless piece o' crap. Oh, and the moment I appear on this invasion of privacy site I'll be sure to remove any information accessible to it.
  • austininin, on 10/10/2007, -3/+34I don't know about this. It asks for your myspace username and password. Seems like a huge phishing Web site....
    • Matt73, on 10/10/2007, -0/+10Same here, though in my case it was for my LinkedIn profile. The fact that a website would even ask for this type of information is incredibly disturbing; it shows either complete ignorance of today's internet society, or there's something more sinister at work (such as, is it going to plant links back to spock.com in my LinkedIn profile?). I'm attempting to 'claim' my profile by establishing a login with spock.com first, then claiming the profile to see if I can do so without entering my LinkedIn info, but I still haven't received the confirmation email from them.
      • subliminalurge, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3This is ridiculous. I'm trying to do the same thing, and it's asking for a login and password for a myspace account that's been long since deleted. As if the creepiness factor of this site wasn't already high enough, now they're asking for your login credentials to other sites?

        It's pretty much impossible to use spock.com without violating the most basic and most important "Internet safety" rule there is.
    • LecherousVenom, on 10/10/2007, -1/+32I noticed that, too.

      When I searched for my own name, the matches it provided (all MySpace, too) were incorrect in every case: either the first name didn't match, the last name, the location, etc, etc. This thing BLOOOWWWS.

      This does, however, give me an idea for the next web 3.0 thing: CaptKirk.com.... where you can look up every woman a guy's slept with in his life. :)
    • dogstar0125, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2Why would you give them a legitimate profile? Set up a fake profile, give them that one. I've got hundreds of profiles all over the damn place and not a single one of them lists a true thing about me.
  • Bajeda, on 10/10/2007, -0/+31I thought it was called spook.com at first. That would have made more sense.
    • solonGFX, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6They really should re-think the name. "spocking" is a reference to a sex act... I really hope they don't want the website to become a verb like Google. "I'm going to google you later" vs "I'm going to spock you later".
      So wrong.
      (For those who've never heard of spocking: Two in the pink two in the stink)
  • RockMyMonkey, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2It has me listed in the Seattle area for some reason. I live several hours from there. Very strange.
    • krets, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3According to that site I am a 42 year old woman but at least it got my residence right.
  • MarkDykeman, on 10/10/2007, -2/+4This is an interesting idea, but kind of frightening at the same time...
  • Piedramente, on 10/10/2007, -1/+22Yeah.... I bet half the visitors are looking for a Star Trek fan site.
  • sutro33, on 10/10/2007, -0/+71Spock.com: The one stop for all your Internet-stalking needs.
  • FatHed, on 10/10/2007, -1/+15It's extremely handy to have an common name.
    • JustinDavid86, on 10/10/2007, -5/+19And also an grasp on the English Language.
    • JCSaint, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7Except when the domain of your name goes to some weirdo artist's website with very very strange oil paintings. I don't paint *****-erotica. I swear. (I'm not making this up either.)
      • Winters, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1I totally feel your pain. I have the same problem with an ambiguously gay Emo "musician" in his late 40's.
  • twrife, on 10/10/2007, -1/+36Just don't ever accomplish anything in your life and you don't have to worry about it.
    Like me! :)
    • colouredlights, on 10/10/2007, -2/+4Yeah but if you don't accomplish anything people will say "oh look at twrife, he's a loser."

      Just sayin', be careful how many life goals you ignore just to stay off Spock!!!!
    • radam, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Dugg for complete agreement.
  • zizzy, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2Damn, it's down. And I was having fun trying to find people I know.
    [EDIT: Never mind, back again. As soon as I posted this comment too.]
  • rejoined, on 10/10/2007, -1/+12This site http://zabasearch.com/ was in one of the articles submitted earlier on Digg. It's scary what you can find there, just with a name and a zip/state.
    • madtaco, on 10/10/2007, -3/+0Wow, they even cloned Google's look.

      Horribly, I might add.
      • madk, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1You mean the look of every search engine on the net.
    • Jrr6415sun, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1that site has been around for awhile.. I remember my sister used to use that website for the first season of american idol to accurately predict who would be voted off by how popular their name was on the internet... it worked pretty well.
    • eyrieowl, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1yeah, zabasearch seems much more useful as a people search at this point in time. it actually has most people, as opposed to spock, which seems to only have indexed personal profiles at sites like livejournal, friendster, etc. i'm not holding my breath.
  • Avili2, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4I got invited last month, and I can say it's creepy how it collects data. I searched myself and was surprised to actually find information on myself - I'm not the kind that easily discloses a lot of information about myself, but this thing is creepy - it had 1 image and that image came from a friends facebook profile. I have no clue how it managed to get in to their database (maybe the photo was put somewhere else by somebody?) but it was a group shot, but the amazing part was that Spock actually managed to identify that I was in that picture..
    • burnswhenipee, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0No. A human identified you as being in that picture and labeled you as such. Craptastic spock.com just indexed the text and linked back to it.

      Are you new to the internet, or what?
  • BrainCoder, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6I think stalkers will love it.
  • jmas9, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3I dont come up in the search. A whole bunch of other people do as my name (which I didn't think was all that common)
    • L33tmaster, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Yeah same here. Apparently I'm either a Viet doctor, a dead person, or a high schooler from mexico.
  • therealNofutcha, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2I signed up for the beta a while back and never received a reply. I feel so used.
  • therealNofutcha, on 10/10/2007, -0/+10This so called 'database' just seems to check popular social networking sites. In the time it takes to do so, i could have checked these sites myself
  • hydroplane, on 10/10/2007, -9/+5Oh dear god please no more social networking sites. Who wants to be contacted by some douche or slut that sat next to you in a 10th grade english class. VD's have an easy enough time spreading without the help of the world wide web. Get off the internet, get a personality, get a life and meet real people if you are so desperate.
  • Solardog, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6129 diggs and the search is broken. Seems like only a minute fraction of that 100 million will actually be able to use the site...
    • madtaco, on 10/10/2007, -5/+3ffs people, # of diggs != # of hits... get it straight.

      Not everyone diggs every article they look at... in fact, some people bury them.
      • subliminalurge, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Exactly. I've run two searches so far on spock.com since seeing this article, and I have not dugg it. I generally only digg articles that I want to refer back to later, and this is not one of them.

        Also worth considering is all of the other places besides digg that people could be hearing about the public beta opening up. Number of diggs really has no correlation to the number of people that are hitting that site at the moment.
    • Radan, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Also, as this is a search engine, there's no doubts about it that people refreshes the page more than once.
  • crapmatic, on 10/10/2007, -0/+22It's ok... they're getting two of the 386SX clusters back online.
    • AlbinoRaven, on 10/10/2007, -3/+8They are going to have to make sure the token ring repeaters are working first though. Good thing OS2 warp comes with effective tools for managing Banyan vines otherwise the site would never be up.
      • fani, on 10/10/2007, -8/+2Shut up.
        The OP was funny. You're just trying to milk it.
        • crapmatic, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1It's cool -- I got a chuckle out of it. Banyan Vines... man, that takes me back to ye olde days reading PC Magazine in 1993.
  • xoticpt, on 10/10/2007, -2/+6rofl... google of nothing... how can you claim to be the google of something then have crappy servers.
    • kingsleyj, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Yeah google *never* went down when they were new
  • xXShadowstormXx, on 10/10/2007, -2/+34He's dead, Jim.
    • _Ty_, on 10/10/2007, -2/+1-that made me choke on my soda!
      • spyrochaete, on 10/10/2007, -3/+1Dammit Ty, I'm a doctor, not a soda jerk!
  • Kyderdog, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4what a great way to poison my profile!
  • madk, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7Spock.com eh. I wonder how many nerd boners occurred just by the thought of owning that domain.
    • colouredlights, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1nah, i got a boner at shatner.com
  • Abscess, on 10/10/2007, -6/+4Buried as Spam.
  • powerbookguy, on 10/10/2007, -4/+6I can has server upgrade?
  • crackedlogic, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7why is this not buried to bejesus and back as spam?
    • spyrochaete, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Seriously, asking people to search for their own name on a people search is just a way for them to seed more data. The results page didn't even work after 2 minutes. I think this is the first story in over a year I've buried as spam.
  • aresef, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Interesting. If only it had Google's speed, we'd be in business.
  • ok4you, on 10/10/2007, -2/+3Sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow
  • fpcyber, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Wow how the hell did it know who I was, where I lived, my age, my relationship status? I am kinda freaked out.
    • Okitaz, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Facebook.
    • ArsenicTea, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1It knew mine from a friendster profile I had under my maiden name. One that deleted a few months ago.
  • spunalot, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3WTF, no John Coctostan. He is my best friend.
  • ruz322, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2That's pretty spooky. Picked up my age, relationship status, link to myspace, my blog, and location among others....
  • cejones, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Could there site BE any slower?
    Their one chance to impress and they blow it
    • hydroplane, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1Oh, loneliness and cheeseburgers are a dangerous mix.
  • LucasKane, on 10/10/2007, -3/+2Never use your real name on the internet unless your buying something on a secure website
  • sholt, on 10/10/2007, -0/+15I clicked on their privacy policy. It said: "Status: 500 Internal Server Error"
    • Hittman6, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I got the same response when I put in my name.

      How impressive.
  • dbalaski, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Well - the main site is down with an internal error
    Guess its going from beta to alpha

  • ipucp, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Status: 500 Internal Server Error - http://www.spock.com/
  • guinnessstout, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1Nice how their database crashes after average user load. Great site!
  • orlyfactor, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3Well, it DOES have the beta tag on it which makes it OK if it sucks *****.
  • synthexic, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1It sucks.
  • cadigger, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0Pretty Lame Site. Not accurate at all.
  • markwood, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Someone never stress tested their servers.
  • drakinwow, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4wow... Status: 500 Internal Server Error... They are going to go a real long way... The next Google for sure...
  • ZedDrebin, on 10/10/2007, -2/+1Dead already... Doesn't anyone know how to build a network anymore?
  • fani, on 10/10/2007, -1/+15"Bones, get the site back up"
    "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a webmaster"
  • isuisorisuaint, on 10/10/2007, -2/+1Status: 500 Internal Server Error
  • fiveplay, on 10/10/2007, -4/+1spock = gay
  • GamingTrend, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2It found me on LinkedIn, but absolutely no other data. You'd have to already know who you were looking for as I was in a sea of people with the same name.
  • szembek, on 10/10/2007, -2/+2Direct Link: http://www.spock.com
    That's all that's needed.
    • mikester540, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Yeah, but the search doesn't work...
  • j3one, on 10/10/2007, -2/+3Oh yah, they are the next big thing for sure.
  • j3one, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Uh Oh

    Looks like we're having problems right now. Try coming back in a bit.
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