The new search engine brings more to the Web content table than a good personality

After an extended, invitation-only beta period, the search engine that indexes people, Spock.com goes public with this today. Performance was sluggish when tested this morning, but it is a novel search engine well worth exploring once it settles down. I tested it extensively months ago and found its un-Google-like approach refreshing. Spock doesn’t crawl sites for word hits so much as extract data from sites pertaining to people. When you search on a category like “men on the moon,” the engine delivers a catalog of astronauts who have walked on the moon rather than pages containing that phrase. Each result is a detailed profile that has been assembled from data at multiple sources.

What Spock is doing is part of the so-called “Semantic Web.” In this model, the Web is not a series of text-based HTML pages that need searching but a set of data points that can be assembled in different ways. Spock pulls data from things like the Internet Movie Database, MySpace, blog pages, etc. to create a database of people that can be indexed and filtered by users, akin to the way we might manipulate any SQL database. Ultimately, I should be able to run a modified version of the search I mentioned above for just astronauts who walked on the moon between 1972 ad 1975. I can’t do that now, because the front-end natural language parser is not up to it, but most of the pieces are here.

What does this kind of flexibility give to content providers? Well, it may allow the search box on a given site to behave more like a human support person. It also allows users to start tagging information and people online more effectively. Spock is also a social-media search engine, in that it lets users tag entries and even manage their own profile in the database. Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media (and Web 2.0 guru) sang Spock’s praises months ago. As a business tool alone he calls it “a great outboard memory connecting names, faces, topics and companies.”

Spock is still very much a beta, and it cannot handle the complex queries that eventually make this model more useful. There is also the issue of its own business model. Getting people away from the major engines and to a new vertical database has doomed many a company over the year. But it points us in the direction of a very different way of thinking about digital content – less as text and pages and more as data. As various sites offer one another APIs that let partners dig into their data and mash it up with others, we will see the real potential of the Semantic Web emerge as the technology prompts us to imagine content differently. 

Posted under Michael's Blog