Spock (website)

{{Infobox website

| name = Spock Networks, Inc.

| logo =

| company_type = Private

| foundation = 2006

| location = Redwood City, California

| key_people = Jaideep Singh, Co-founder/CEO
Jay Bhatti, Co-founder/VP product
Hongche Liu, Chief Information Architect

| revenue =

| url = [http://www.spock.com/ www.spock.com]

| screenshot = Spock.png

| screenshot_size = 200px

| caption = Screenshot of spock.com

| website_type = Search engine

| language = English

| registration = optional

| launch_date = 2006

| current_status = active

}}

Spock was a U.S. search website specialized in finding people; also known as a vertical search engine or entity search engine. The name "Spock" is a backronym: "single point of contact (by) keyword."[http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3626678 Spock Joins Crowded People Search Space] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070811193152/http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3626678 |date=2007-08-11 }} Founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh, it "indexed over 250 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records."[http://www.spock.com/do/pages/pr_web_expo http://www.spock.com/do/pages/pr_web_expo] These records were from publicly available sources, including Wikipedia, IMDb, ESPN, LinkedIn, Hi5, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, 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".[https://techcrunch.com/2007/04/11/exclusive-screenshots-spocks-new-people-engine/ Exclusive Screenshots: Spock’s New People Engine by Michael Arrington]

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 algorithms.[http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/webis/publications/papers/stein_2008h.pdf Weighted Experts: A Solution for the Spock Data Mining Challenge]

Spock opened its service to public beta on August 8, 2007.[https://techcrunch.com/2007/08/08/spock-open-public-beta-make-your-favorite-top-10-list/ Spock Open Public Beta by Nick Gonzalez]

On April 30, 2009, Spock was acquired by Intelius.[http://www.techflash.com/Intelius_buys_Spock_44100352.html Intelius buys Spock]