The one thing I really love about the internet is that every so often I discover a website so completely interesting and highly addictive that I feel like telling every about it. Well, it’s happened again, I’ve found another site that I just can’t get enough of and I’m feeling the need to share my enthusiasm with all of my loyal readers here on this Affiliate Best Programs blog. The site I’m sharing with you today is called Spock.com and no, it’s not a Trekkie fansite. Although the name brings certain science fiction connotations to mind, rest assured there are no Vulcans or Starship Captains on Spock, bit it is very futuristic and is a wonderful example of the positive use of technology. Additionally, if you’re expecting my post today to be about affiliate programs or making money on the internet, I hate to burst your bubble but Spock is not an affiliate program and you don’t earn money from using it. Instead, Spock is a “People Search Engine” and possibly one of the most intelligent search sites I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. If you’re into historcal people, famous people, celebrities, sports stars, business giants or just about anybody who has achieved some modicum of success, chances are that a plethora of pertinent information can be found about them in a Spock search.
For example, here’s a sample of a Spock search for the infamous Matt Cutts of Google fame…
Edited due to spyware
When you search Spock for a particular person, you get a whole lot more than just the generic information usually found at sites like Wikipedia or other simplistic sources, you get pictures of your search, video, audio clips and almost anything else that is tied to a particular persons online (and offline) identity. The results returned Spock are far more comprehensive than a Google and Spock is completely free of spam and junk results which makes it perfect for research projects or just poking around and looking up people for fun.
One word of warning, this site can become highly addictive because each listing is accompanied by “tags” that group people into easily accessible groups. Once you start searching and researching you’ll find yourself clicking on the tags to see what other people are grouped with the person you’re looking for. In certain respects, Spock is similar to the site LinkedIn except Spock simply blows the afformentioned site away due to the incredible depth and complexity of the data and presentation of the data. Spock uses a very clean interface that without advertising or spam cluttering up the results and the Web 2.0 design is both appealing and enhances the end user experience.
Spock is also a “social site” that fosters community by allowing registered Users to vote up or down a tag if they feel it is relevant or irrelevant to a particular search result. This “community” feature essentially helps deliver Spock’s end users a far more accurate and thorough search experience due to the fact that real people who are interested in enhancing the site are participating in enhancing the information returned by searches.
Regardless if you’re a casual user just curious about your favorite celebrities or if you’re a more comples user interested in doing advanced research on a particular person’s history, I highly recommend giving Spock a try and you will see why I’m so impressed with it that I felt the need to share it with you, my loyal readers.
Spock People Search Engine is still in Beta mode so all enthusiasts are encouraged to get involved now and help make Spock one of the greatest search tools on the internet. I’m personally interested in watching the growth of this site over the next few months and into the future because there has never been anything I’ve ever seen on the internet that compares to what the creators of this site are attempting to accomplish. In my humble opinion, this project deserves loyal supporters because of the originality and the overall magnitude of encompassing the scope of human accomplishment and putting it at the fingertips of the average interenet user. Best of all, Spock is completely free of charge.
That’s pretty amazing that you can get a search result on individual people. But don’t you think that kind of invades privacy? I am not too sure. But again I personally, might enjoy using this site cause who doesn’t like to peep a little but then again I wouldn’t want anybody else prying on me ;-)
Searches at Spock are not personal searches on any information that sn’t already available on the internet. For example: If you were searching a neighbor “Dan Smith” or “Gloria Jones” and those people had not accomplished anything noteworthy, there would be no results. Spock isn’t like credit bureaus,US Search or Intellius in that it doesn’t return private or personal data, it merely culminates already accessible data from across the internet into on easy to use interface.
So to answer your question, there is no “invasion of privacy” on individuals, but Spock is a culmination of information avaliable on noteworthy people.
That’s what makes it so cool. So many times when I’m looking for info on a politician, an actor, actress, musician, programmer, CEO (all people in the public eye), I generally have to search multiple sources for information to do a blog postor an article with factual details. Spock is pulls all those sources together which is a phenomenal resource for researchers, writers and publishers.
Plus, it’s just fun to surf the tags and look for noteworthy people in categories. For me, I’m a huge Baseball and Punk Rock music fan, and I enjoy reading bios because each one has bits and pieces different from each other. From what I’ve learned about Spock thus far, they culminate sources and present them accordingly. What I love is the “tags”. Say I look up Pete Shelley from the band “The Buzzcocks”, a band I know a lot about, I’m so impressed with the relevevancy……
See this link….
http://www.spock.com/q/the-buzzcocks
Of course, Pete Shelley comes up first, one of his tags is “LGBT musician” and of course, Pete has always been “open” about his sexualty which is why most of us “old-school” punks love Shelley and the Buzzcocks. Even cooler, the seond result is John Haggerty of the 80’s Chicago punk band band Naked Raygun, who were infulenced by the Buzzcocks and Stiff Little Fingers. From there, you can just keep drilling down into a musiicans influences and what influenced them and so on and so on…
so, Linking Links, somebody has to have done something that got the into the public eye to get listed and no private data is revealed, only data that has appeared in conventional and internet media.
Play with the site, it’s fun. I personally try not to waste too much time digging around sites like this but Spock grabs my attention as much as my arcane fascinatin with http://www.findadeath.com
I persoanlly think Spock.com would be even cooler if they integrated findadeath.com info (btw, findadeath.com is a site where you can look up how celebrities passed away, and even has pictures of their houses and gravestones. Agan, be careful, you might spend a lot of time on sites like this f you’re a curiosity seeker !!!
:-)
Couldn’t you have found somebody more intersting to showcase than that lame Google pimp Matt Cutts ??? The guy is a total pawn in Google’s system.
I’m not suprised you wrote about Spock.com because the service is one the best website to come around in the last decade. I don’t know what they could do to make it better because it’s one of the best executed top sites I have seen since I’ve been on the net. The only thing I don’t like is that I peand waaaaay too much time on it searching between the tags and I always find something I wasn’t aware of. I love this site.