Spock Automatically Profiles People Through Search
April 15, 2007 by Jayvee Fernandez
Filed under Computers
Sure, you could Google that hot date to make sure she isn’t an ax murderer — but what if a search engine could automatically create public profiles of people and their relationships just by crawling their Web presences? That’s what “people search engine” Spock plans to do, claiming that 30% of all searches are people-related.
…where Spock really shines is what they do after the search is completed. They are slowly indexing the entire web, which is no small feat, but focusing on important hubs of people information like blogs, wikipedia, photo sites and, of course, social networks. Each person discovered by their search engine is run through a process of de-duping (for people with identical or similar names) and given a permanent profile page… Spock auto-creates tags for individuals based on the information they find.
Worried about your profile getting Google… er, Spockbombed? Then you can claim your profile with an email address matching any of your social network profiles, giving you more voting weight in your tags and description. Of course, if you don’t have any social network profiles, you’re pretty much screwed (Spocked?).
Robert Scoble calls Wikipedia’s policy of not having a page for every person “lame”. That people are discouraged from editing their own biographies on Wikipedia is even lamer. Spock can pick up all that slack, better tapping the biographical wisdom of the crowds through a bot instead of a bunch of contributors. If it works, it’ll be a hot target for Google acquisition — and libel suits.
(Via Michael Arrington.)
It will be interesting to see how Spock compares to Wink.com in the people search area.
I’m curious what will happen when false information is added to someone’s profile. I can imagine something along the lines of this: Someone’s spock profile falsely adds the tag “serial killer” or “rapist”, but what recourse does the owner of the profile have?
Someone will learn how to hack this. I can see an enemy hacking someone’s spock profile and adding any number of fake tags. What’s a person to do? They can’t delete the tags. Imagine waking up one day and finding the tag “sex offender” attached to your profile.
Since an indexing algorithm adds the tags, not human users, you’d have to fool the algorithm into adding those tags.
Heard of Googlebombs? Get ready for Spockbombs. ;)
I have tested out adding tags, and your wrong about it being only an algorhythm involved. I can add any tag I want to on any entry.
I just added the tag “potato head” to vladamir putin’s profile. What’s to stop me from entering “sex offender” or any other false tag? So far, nothing.