Have You Spocked?
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I’m coming up on my 20th high school reunion. 20 years! Can you believe it? OK< so maybe YOU can believe it, but my own jaw is still slack from the recognition that time is speeding along like a demon. It’s a tad more than frightening and absolutely boggling my poor mind. Anyway, I’ve been even more driven to round up the contact information for as many of my old (and I say that respectfully) high school classmates as I can lately. I have used some of the more conventional means, like traditional search engines and the more established social networking sites. I’ve found that the contact info on the larger sites that have specifically been designed for classmate reunion issues are troublesome, because both members have to be paid account holders in order to make final contact and 99% of the time, that is a miss.
In my quest for a unique people search, I came across the Spock.com beta search. It’s a new people search engine where you can either search by an exact name or a “tag”, like “New York” or “likes the Ramones” or “maybe even the name of a movie. People can vote on the tags.
I thought I would go with a more common search to test out the system, so I began with the name of one of my favorite comedy groups, The Kids in the Hall. The results returned the entire cast and anyone else n the system who had worked on the show, so that let mew know how the results filtered. I added “likes” to the beginning of my first search query to see what it did to the results and that narrowed things down nicely to people who were fans of the troupe.
So, I moved onto searching for people from my old high school and I was met with a little less success, since filtering by year was harder. None the less, I have to keep in mind that this is a Beta program and it really does rock for what it can do already.
The cool thing about Spoke is that it is not a social network or a traditional search engine. It’s a whole other animal. You can sign up and add to your own profile and tags, but additionally, the system combs multiple other sites bio pages, social networks, news sites, blogs, and directories to compile info.
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