Type of site Search engine Website www.spock.com Registration optional Type of business Private | Available in English Alexa rank 483,187 (April 2014) Founded 2006 Founders Jaideep Singh, Jay Bhatti | |
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Key people Jaideep Singh, Co-founder/CEO
Jay Bhatti, Co-founder/VP product
Hongche Liu, Chief Information Architect Headquarters Redwood City, California, United States | ||
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." Founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh, it has "indexed over 250 million people representing over 1.5 billion data records." These records are from publicly available sources, including Wikipedia, IMDB, ESPN, LinkedIn, Hi5, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, FEC, 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".
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.
Spock opened its service to public beta on August 8, 2007.
Financing
In December 2006, Spock raised $7 million in a Series A round of funding from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital.
On April 30, 2009, Spock was acquired by Intelius.