Review the Market

Spock.com is a search engine for finding people. Not just people that you know, but also people that anyone has ever known in the history of mankind. You can do these searches by name or by other keywords. These keywords can be anything that describes the person you are looking for, for example ‘president’. Once you have found your result, you can go and look at the main page for that result. Take a look at the page for George Washington, for example, which is arrived at clicking on the first result when you search for George Washington. On the other hand you could search for your friends or people you knew in the past.

One very interesting feature is the ability to embed widgets containing a particular search on Spock on your website. So for example, related to our example here’s a widget for US Presidents:

Spock allows you to tag search results (resulting in the ability to search by keywords rather than by name). Not only can you add tags to your own identity. You can add tags on other people as well, and vote on tags that already exist. And also, although they claim not to be a social network, they do allow you to add trust links between people you know; this allows your search results to be ranked by trust (where you will see your trusted people before you see non-trusted ones for a particular search).

Signing up is fairly quick and easy and as shown below, Spock allows you to pull in contacts from other networks you may be part of:

Step 3 allows you tell Spock a little bit about yourself and you are done. I have added myself to Spock already, and am going to recommend my friends to add themselves as well.