Spock: Search People By Profession
Tags: Internet, Spock, Vertical Search

A people search engine, Spock that launched in August this year has added many interesting features recently, from messaging service to Flash widget, and now the indexed of many professionals. Now those who use Spock to search people can find many professionals by typing “doctor,” “lawyer,” “real estate agent,” or “cardiologist,” and etc. into the search engine and Spock will return the search results to you.
Spock has generated a massive buzz in the recent months, it is much due to the reason of people search is a huge market. For us, we visited social networking sites before, and find the information on a single person, therefore we know people search has became a trend nowadays. In fact, the value of Spock and other people search engines available on the Web lies not so much in the unique search technology, but in the critical mass of users that they aggregate. It seems that Spock is on its way achieving this through the offered of people search by profession, and constantly engage their users in revealing their personal information with their own photo as well. Meanwhile, they also seeking the feedback from their users about the next features of its platform.
Spock’s current business model is Google AdSense and at this moment, there are several players penetrated into this people search industry, such as PeekYou and Yasni.
Update: In December 2006, Spock has successfully raised $7.2M in a Series A round of funding from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital.


December 2nd, 2007 at 12:06 am
So far Spock.com seems to work best when searching for people who are famous politicians or celebrities. It starts to break down when searching for everyday people. We’ll see how it progresses.
September 4th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
[...] people search, and there are lots of other people search engines on the Web today, that include Spock, PeekYou, Yasni, ZoomInfo, Wink, and WikiYou (not available at the time of my [...]