Spock Publicly Launches Next Generation People Search Application

After a very successful private beta, Spock launched its public beta on 8th August. With over one hundred million people already indexed and millions added every day, Spock is building the broadest and deepest people specific search engine.

"Searching for people is one of the most important applications on the web, however, the user experience is highly fragmented and unsatisfying today" said Jaideep Singh, CEO of Spock. "From celebrity blogs to social networks, people are inherently drawn to learning about other people. Spock provides the richest people search experience on the web."

With an estimated 20 billion search queries about people done per month, Spock is positioning itself to dominate this burgeoning space. According to BusinessWeek, "Spock is trying to capture some of the more than $60 billion that is projected to be spent on search marketing over the next four years."

Unlike Google and Yahoo, which index web pages, Spock organizes information around a specific individual. For example, when you type "boxer" into Spock, the top search results are Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson. The top boxer search result on Google returns a Wikipedia entry for a "boxer" dog.

Spock creates a snapshot of a person's presence from public sources on the web. These include a brief biographical summary, pictures, and related content found from publicly available sources on the web. Additionally, registered users can add content to Spock to enrich their own profiles and the profiles of others.

Since Spock launched into private beta in April, the service has already received wide industry acclaim and awards from respected technology luminaries. Spock was also selected as Best of Show at the prestigious Web 2.0 conference and for PC Magazine's top 25 websites to watch in 2007.

"In anticipation of our public beta launch, we had catered for peak capacity of 100 page views a second, which translates to 300 million page views a month. However, since this morning we have been getting a consistent request rate of 300 to 400 page views a second, which translates to nearly 1 billion page views a month.

Although this level of demand is gratifying, we sincerely apologize for not being able to serve it all. The entire Spock team is working hard to add more capacity today and tomorrow. Please bear with us while we add more bandwidth to meet the needs of our global user base" said Jaideep Singh, Co-founder & CEO of spock.