As I read about thousands of startups per year, I always like the ones that are trying to innovate in search. I really think someone can do it better than Google, especially with trying to find famous people. Most of the major search engines do not do justice when trying to find people, but Spock allows you to find them easily. I decided to do a people search on Adam Curry, a famous podcaster and former V-J at M.T.V. Now the result gave me a ton of information, including pictures of himself, and his wife who looks rather well, different than most women do in America. Plus, it listed details about his podcast, his airplane and even his birthday. So you can get to know Adam Curry pretty darn well right off the bat!
Of course, with any major tech startup you have to have a widget. I am going to embed a widget for Adam Curry at the bottom of this post and see how it looks in a few minutes. The preview on Spock looks cool as it displays much the same information as the regular results page does but in a much smaller space. The one thing that really is driving me nuts right now is that it is difficult to get the widget code to work in WordPress. I have put code tags around it but yet it still refuses to work. This will mean I will have to go into the html, which you usually do not have to for blogs to get widgets to work. Oh well, I’ll try and see if I can fix it, probably not though.
EDIT: Turns out the widget does work in WordPress, it just does not display well on the preview background in the WP-editor. I really like the widget though, wish they would allow some customization of it.
Still Spock is a great piece of software. They combine the best of both worlds by having good search engine technology and allowing their users to tag peoples articles. I think it is only a matter of time before you see them taking a dynamic role in the people search market.
