I’ve been playing around with spock.com, the “people” search engine (a sort of meta-social network). Bit miffed to discover that I’m listed 211th of all the James Graham’s in all the world that have ever existed (Google is much gentler on the old ego).
Type in Liberal Democrat and you get a very interesting set of results. Barack Obama is the first result (if only), with Chris Huhne, Charles Kennedy, Ming Campbell, Lynne Featherstone and Nancy Pelosi in places 2-6. Stephen Tall is in seventh place, but in the photo he appears to have turned into Jock Coats. Richard Allan, 8th, appears to have turned into two different people I don’t recognise at all.
Meanwhile, I suspect that Saj Karim, Nadine Dorries, Kerron Cross, Alex Salmond, Rudi Vis and Stephan Shakespeare will appreciate being listed 11th, 12th, 14th, 16th, 18th and 19th respectively.
Alan Reid seems to have found the secret of youth as well.
http://www.spock.com/Alan-Reid
I don’t even get a mention at all 🙁 Mind you nor does my namesake who has been world champion so I suspect it’s a bit US centric
Though I do like the 6th return in Google:
“Even by the standards of the age, James Graham must be accounted something of a quack.” 🙂
James,
There are a few explanations for why your search result may have appeared illogically on Spock.com. The first is that you didn’t search by specific enough criteria. Similar to Google and Yahoo, more common names will likely return of someone more famous. On Spock people are sorted by relevance and then enriched content or tags as we call them. Thus if you would have searched by your name and then another identifying piece of information such as where you live, an occupation, etc you would have been more likely to find a more relevant result.
Another possible option is that you are not currently indexed on Spock. Because some people actively maintain a private presence on the Web through entirely private profiles, or other anonymous means, it’s possible that there is very little publicly available information. While we have almost 300 Million people uniquely indexed, we are far from having every single person.
The great thing about Spock is that you can add yourself to the site and enrich the content about yourself and others. So with your search for liberal democrat, you can vote up the term “liberal democrat” on someones search result who belongs there, and if they were to have enough votes in their favor then that particular person would register first under the term. Similarly if someone was not a liberal democrat you could vote down that information or flag it entirely for deletion (say if George Bush was listed as liberal democrat).
Please contact me if you have any other questions or comments – patrick@corp.spock.com
Patrick,
I think I should point out that by “illogical” I meant amusing. Live long and prosper!
I’m currently hooked on this thing. I like that I’ve been not only able to find old classmates but I’ve been able to help them get in touch with EACH OTHER, without having to use one of the many school-mate websites, or start yet another mailing list.
It’s also a good wakeup call to those who feel their social networking environment is their private domain. Guess what kids? Dat der Internet is public. Spock could be called SPOTLIGHT ’cause it’s like a big ol’ spotlight shining in the dark corners of online and bringing it out into the open. Mums and Dads and Grams and Gramps and teacher too can see you. They were able to before too, but as word about spock gets out on myspace and hi5, there will be a lot of surprised teens out there.
As I heard once a long time ago, never post anything on Usenet that you wouldn’t want your mother, your father, your teacher, your preacher or your local policeman or your next boss to see. Same holds true for Google. Same holds true for Spock.
http://www.spock.com/Kenneth-Udut-zeeIb1Ou
Spock fanatic.