Comments on: Google’s People Search - Spock speaks out

By: In Anchor » SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 12, 2007

In Anchor » SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 12, 2007 — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 00:15:41 +0000

[...] Google’s People Search - Spock speaks out, Alt Search Engines [...]

By: quickda

quickda — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:04:17 +0000

[...] the full story here No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI [...]

By: people » Google’s People Search - Spock speaks out

people » Google’s People Search - Spock speaks out — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 22:48:23 +0000

[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]

By: SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 12, 2007 · Seo Alchemist

SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 12, 2007 · Seo Alchemist — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:21:47 +0000

[...] Google’s People Search - Spock speaks out, Alt Search Engines [...]

By: HELM, WHM/cPanel, Windows, Linux and SEO Blog » Blog Archive » SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 12, 2007

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:11:11 +0000

[...] Google’s People Search - Spock speaks out, Alt Search Engines [...]

By: Jay

Jay — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:52:47 +0000

Hi Anon - I believe that either you must be wrongly informed or work for one of our so called competitors:)

To elaborate on your points.

1. We NEVER email anyone that you may scan from your address book without your express permission. I welcome you to go through our sign-up process and see that we double confirm with you if you really want us to invite people from your address book to Spock.

2. We NEVER reveal email addresses of anyone. Unlike google or other so called people search engines, we do not display personally identifiable informaton like your email, phone, or home address. Even if that information is publically available on the internet, we do not display it. It’s our policy that such information should be controlled by the person.

3. We do not harvest social networks or any such word you use. We crawl the entire web with the same policy and standards of any other search engine. We honor all robots.txt files and follow all generally accepted crawling princliples.

I wish that you would take a tour of Spock and see our policy on how we educate users on Internet privacy and our policy around personal information.

By: Anon Cowar

Anon Cowar — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 05:38:08 +0000

There is some info at http://www.spock.com/do/pages/help . It doesn’t appear to be a strictly opt-in system. It appears there is harvesting from social networking sites and other sources. I think I read something about it inviting new users to import contacts from online address books they use(!). I think I also read that said contacts are spammed with invites unless the new user opts-out of that. So it sounds like any clueless and inconsiderate person you know could compromise you, your email address, and your relationship(s). So if privacy, business relationships, or whatever are of concern to you it would probably be best if you spread word that there are sites like this (don’t point people to them of course) and inform people so they know to avoid them and/or know they should never… EVER… upload contacts or otherwise contribute information about their relationships without permission from the other parties. Corporations should of course block access to the site.

By: AC

AC — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 03:25:05 +0000

Is this a 100% opt-in thing? I mean, you don’t intend to index people who haven’t explicitly signed up do you?

By: google » Alt Search Engines " Blog Archive " Google’s People Search - Spock speaks out

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 02:32:18 +0000

[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt [...]

By: Jay

Jay — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:53:10 +0000

Hi Adam - thanks for your questions, let me see if I can answer them.

1. If a social network like Facebook or MySpace grows big enough, then people search is a by-product that you get. However, even if one of these sites were to have 300 million users, that still is not even 5% of the world’s population. Our mission is to index everyone in the world. This includes famous people, normal people, historical people. Furthermore, while on some social networks you can search by school / work, that does not mean that you get all the results back - it will not be comprehensive. To add to that, you are limited on those terms. At Spock, we want you to be able to go to and search for people who were US presidents and left handed.. The types of Searches you could do on Spock are unlimited.

2. I did a google search for “John Smith, Kennedy High School, Fairfax, VA” and all the result I got back was pretty poor - the second result was of someone else named Kristen. Google is really good at document search, but people search requires a different set of technology and thinking. Even when I clicked in more details, I did not get the right result with Google Base.

3. There is a big disconnect between people who dont have the time to create blogs, social sites, etc vs. them not wanting to be found. We have a lot of doctors, dentists and real-estate agents on Spock who do not have much of a web presence, but REALLY like the fact that people can find them when you type in “doctor, san diego” in Spock. People do want to be found, as long as the way you find them is meaningful to them “looking for a doctor, lawyer, etc”

The vision of Spock is to index everyone so that we can help you find and organize everyone in your life.

Hope this helps
Jay