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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Jack Schofield

Spock means never having to be confused with anybody else

OK, so you probably don't have very much privacy anyway -- as Sun's Scott McNealy said years ago, "Get over it." However, if you're partly protected on Google by having a common name, Spock is going to come along and disambiguate you. The site says:



Spock is the online leader in personal search, helping users find and discover people. With over one hundred million people already indexed and millions added every day, Spock is building the broadest and deepest people specific search engine.



It's a closed beta at the moment so I can't try it, but Tim O'Reilly has written a couple of things about it. He says:



The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds (and it gathers information on people from Wikipedia, social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook), but it also lets users add tags of their own, and vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics. Users can also identify relationships between people (friend, co-worker, etc.), upload pictures, and provide other types of information.



Of course, Spock isn't the first or the only "people search" engine. Others include ZoomInfo and Uncloo.

Uncloo is based in China but there's a Google-like English version at http://www.ucloo.com/english/search.html. I just tried it, and the first hit was to my entry on ZoomInfo....

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