Nick Gonzales over at TechCrunch points out that Spock publically launched yesterday. The notion of aggregating information about people by crawling the open web isn’t new–ZoomInfo.com, as well as other companies, have been doing it successfully for a while now.
Given the recent attention associated with the launch, Spock got hit with a bunch of traffic today. According to their about page, “Spock is the online leader in personal search, helping users find and discover people.” However, given the number of error pages that were being returned throughout the day, Spock is the online leader in “Uh Oh. Looks like we’re having problems right now” errors. (“Web 2.0: It’s like Web 1.0, without the uptime.”) It’s always amazing to see how people build these services, always deferring the scalability issues “until later” and when “later” comes, they’re wholly unprepared and get trounced.
After all that, I do have to say that one aspect of Spock’s result page for my name really made me smile:
Spock actually knows that I like blondes! Now that’s an intelligent search index. Of course, this same feature knows who likes analingus, so maybe it’s not such a great idea, after all. :-)
Tags: Web 2.0, Spock, stalkerware, people search
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