Spock has been unleashed to those people who signed up early to be beta testers. I was one of those people having seen a presentation at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
Spock is a people search engine. It describes itself as "personal search, helping users find and discover people". With over 100 million people indexed it's seems to have fairly good start. I wasn't in the seed list but my friend and fellow co-founder of the Mars Institute, Pascal Lee, was. It seems Spock went out and grabbed all the people from Wikipedia and used that to help seed their own search. However when I searched for another business partner in a different venture I came up with someone who had the same name but was not who I was looking for. To me this shows one of the problems Spock will have. What happens when there X number of matches for the same name? To help solve that problem Spock uses user input to tag people and to confirm if the tag is relevant. Very smart.
Spock is trying to get into a niche market that it thinks there is both a demand and need for. Tim O'Reilly described Spock as "really, really impressive. It's thinking about whether there are other classes of data to which search hasn't really been applied."
There are challenges though, as I know as I'm working on my own vertical search platform, and to address these challenges Spock is trying a unique approach.
Spock has launched a $50,000 prize, labeled the Spock Challenge. They could have gone the open source way and opened up their platform and have outside developers work on the platform but instead they went with the prize model. This could potentially achieve the same result while at the same time keeping the technology proprietary. They see their main problem as clustering web documents accurately for what they call Entity Resolution.
It will be interesting to see how Spock evolves and if it can solve it's Entity Resolution. If it does then Spock could be a force to contend with in the personalized search market.
A last note on Spock, when I was first notified that I could start using Spock, sometime last week, I was given 3 invitations to hand out to friends and colleagues. Today I notice that it's now up to 101. perhaps their user base was not as large as hoped. So if anyone needs an invitation I have few left to give out :-)