Since launching a few weeks ago, the people search engine Spock is experiencing very heavy traffic - according to the company and also external measures like Alexa. Spock is currently rated number 1 on the Movers and Shakers page on Alexa. Other Alexa stats indicate that the site is experiencing good growth in France, Germany, U.K. and Belguim - as well as the U.S. The site is just outside the top 1000 websites in Alexa, so it is still small in terms of other mainstream search engines. However for a brand new site, its growth must be encouraging to the founders and investors.
The company told us they had 1 million unique visitors at launch and "a very strong engagement from users" - averaging 10 search pages per visitor. Spock has indexed 1.5 billion records to date and they say they're "adding more every day". The site gets around 20 billion search queries about people per month and the company says it is positioning itself to dominate the people search space.
Spock eventually aims to "index everyone in the world", although they admit that right now you need "a presence on the web" to be sure of being in the system - since Spock indexes information from public sources only.
Alex Iskold reviewed Spock for Read/WriteWeb at the end of June and his conclusion was that "Spock is fascinating because of its focus and leverage of semantics. Using tags as relationships and the feedback loop strike me as having great potential to grow a learning system organically, in the matter that learning systems evolve in nature. Most importantly, it is pragmatic and instantly useful."
I have to admit I was initially a skeptic about Spock, because in the beta phase it seemed to be filled with Silicon Valley insiders and nobody else. As of now the site seems a little more 'democratic' and even I have a profile on there. However, there are still glitches in the system. I've now tried 3-4 times to "claim my profile" and every time I get this error:
"Uh Oh
Looks like we're having problems right now. Try coming back in a bit."
That may be something to do with the heavy demand, but it needs addressing. Even so, congratulations to Spock on the successful launch.
Update: Spock contacted me to say that the 20 billion monthly Spock searches number is incorrect. That is in fact the total available market. I've struck out that statement from the post.
]]>