Help

How do I search?

See that text box up at the top of every page? Go ahead and type in a name, e-mail, location, or tag to find people. For example, you can find atheists who are democrats and have brown hair or San Franciscan women age 20 to 22. Want to know how I specified age and location? Just click "Advanced".

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How do I claim a search result?

To claim a search result on Spock, click "Claim" on the upper right hand corner of the page. When you have successfully claimed your search result on Spock, it will be merged with your current search result, and will be tied to your Spock account. For this reason, please do not claim your spouse or dependants' search results - Spock will think you are the same person!

Claiming by Credentials

If the search result contains information from a social network profile, we ask that you log in to the social network in order to verify your identity.

Claiming by E-mail

If the search result has an e-mail address associated with it, we will send a validation e-mail to that address. Remember to check old accounts for the e-mail.

Claiming by Spock Team

All other claiming requests will be reviewed by our quality assurance team before being approved.

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What if there are multiple search results for one person?

You can request to have multiple search results - of you, or someone else - merged together. To suggest a merge, click "Merge Duplicates" on the sidebar of a search results listing that contains the people you want to merge. Then, click the checkbox next to each name you want to merge. Just click "Suggest Merge" at the bottom when you're done. If you check back in a couple hours, the search results will be merged into one!

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Who are My People?

My People represents the individuals who are most relevant to you when searching. A person does not have to be a member of Spock to be included in My People. The only requirement is that Spock has a search result for them.

My People includes:

My People allows you to quickly aggregate all of the people in your life in one place so you can easily find information about them. You can search for people who are within two degrees of you, discover people that share mutual interests, activities, or professions, and make meaningful connections.

How do I add results to my My People?

To quickly add friends to My People, you can have Spock search your address book (we support AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, Plaxo, Gmail, and more) to see the people in your life that are already indexed on Spock. You can also sync your contacts from popular social networks like Linkedin and MySpace. If Spock is able to find information about these people on the internet, we will add their search results to My People.

You can establish a Trust Relationship and add other Spock Users to My People by clicking "Request Trust" on their search result. If they approve, they will become one of your Trusted Contacts.

How do I search my My People?

To search your My People, click on the My People tab on the top right corner of any page. You can search anyway you would normally search on Spock - Spock does not constrain search to categories such a profession, work, or school. You can type in a name, or you can enter in a tag or descriptor to find people by interests, location, social group, or any other association that you know them by.

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What does trust mean on Spock?

Trusting someone allows you to

Who is in my Trusted Contacts?

You can see how many people are in your Trusted Contacts on the home page when you are logged in. Also, when you perform a network search an indicator will tell you when someone is in your Trusted Contacts or connected to you through your Trusted Contacts.

Who should I trust?

To get the most relevant search experience you should only establish a trust relationship with people you know. This way when you perform a network search you will see people you know, or people you know through a friend and can contact easily.

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How do I contribute information?

Any logged in user can contribute tags, related people, news, websites, names, and pictures to any search result on Spock. All of this information can then be voted on by the Spock Community.

Tags

Tags are searchable words or short phrases that are relevant to a person. Tags do not necessarily describe the person. For example, "Harry Potter" does not describe J.K. Rowling, but it is very relevant to her.

Related People

The Related People section allows you to define relevant connections between search results on Spock. Each relationship between people should be entered in separately. For example, if someone is both your friend and your college classmate, enter these individually. Then people will be able to vote on each relationship.

News

News keeps you posted on the latest information about people on Spock. This section shows three different types of information.

On the Web

The On the Web section is the place where all web pages about a person are listed. This includes profiles from social networking sites, personal web pages, and other pages that containg biographical data. The full URL to a page should be entered, beginning with 'http://'. When the Spock Robot adds information to a search result, the source is listed in the On the Web section.

Names

You can add an unlimited number of names to allow people to find you. Please add any versions (including nicknames) of your name that you are known by. To add a new name, just click "Add Name".

Pictures

Pictures tell a lot about someone, so add as many pictures as you have to search results. We encourage you to add pictures of yourself and others, but please, no pictures of cats!

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How do I vote on information?

You can vote on the information on any search result on Spock.  Voting expresses your opinion on the relevance and accuracy of tags, websites, etc.  By casting a vote, it pushes up or down the ranking of the tag, picture, or website that you have voted on. When you vote on a tag, it affects the ranking of that person when people search for that search term.

Voting on Individual Pieces of Information

Just click on the blue arrow next to the information, and click whether or not it is relevant to that person.  Voting information determines the order that the information is shown in, so that the default picture on a search result is the one with that has been voted up the most.

Voting on All Pictures and All Tags

For an easy way to vote on tags and pictures, just click "Vote on tags" or "Vote on pictures" within every search result. This will take you through every tag and picture, letting you vote on each one. Don't worry though - you don't have to know everything about a person. We have a "Not Sure" button that allows you to skip without voting. This is a great way to ask your friends to vote - you can ask them to vote on pictures of Donna Feldman or on whether Steve Jobs is cool or not.

Change Your Mind?

In case you entered incorrect information, just click the blue arrow, then "Change Vote," then "Remove Vote."  If no one else has already voted on that piece of information, it will be removed from the search result.

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What is Spock Power?

Spock Power is determined by an algorithm that rewards loyal Spock users and prevents spam by weighting each Spock user's votes. Spock Power determines how much influence you have on Spock each time you vote or add a tag, image, link, or relationship. The more power you have, the greater your ability to influence the results on Spock. For more information, please check out the Spock Power page.

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Who can edit information...

On any search result?

Anyone who has a Spock account can edit tags, pictures, relationships, names, news, and websites on any search result by voting.

On my own claimed search result?

Claiming your search result allows you to shape how it appears. On your own search result you have absolute control over your gender, birthday, location and blurb. You can also add contact information so your Trusted Contacts can always know how to stay in touch with you. No one else can vote on these, and you can change them at any time simply by clicking on them. You also have increased power to vote information down on your search result.

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How can I flag incorrect information?

You can flag any item by clicking the blue arrow next to it, and selecting "Flag this item". You will be prompted to enter in a reason for the flag (i.e. incorrect, offensive, or personal information) and any additional comments you may have. You can flag anything that can be voted on. You can also flag entire search results by selecting "Flag" in the right-hand column of the search result. Once something has been flagged, our team will review the flagging and remove items as appropriate.

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Why are you asking me for my logon credentials?

We ask for logon credentials during sign-up to help you claim any search results of you that may already exist on Spock.  If you do this during the sign up process, all of your search results on Spock will be consolidated into one search result. If you want to claim search results generated from social network profiles later, you will need to provide your logon credentials. Logon credentials are the fastest and most secure way to automatically verify your identity.

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Where did this information come from?

Spock collects and aggregates information from several different types of sources.

What guidelines does the Spock Robot follow?

We follow the same guidelines that every other search engine does around crawling.  The Spock Robot obeys robots.txt files.  We only crawl public sites that allow us to crawl them, and we do not include information from password protected sites.

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Is Spock going to find personally identifiable information about me and display it?

Spock cares very much about privacy. Our goal is never to display personally identifiable information such as your birthdate, phone number, e-mail address, or other similar information without your permission. As a site that accepts member contributions this can be a challenge at times. If you see personally identifiable information added to Spock by someone other than the owner of that information please flag it so we can remove it!

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Delete me!

We hate to see you go! If you've signed up for Spock, and now want your account deleted, just flag your own search result, enter "Delete account" in the comments field, and we'll delete your account.

If you haven't signed up, we will delete your search result only if:

The source of your search result (your LinkedIn profile, MySpace profile, etc.) no longer contains public information

You must remove public sources of information about you on the web in order to be removed from Spock. Spock routinely crawls the web for publicly available information about people. Deleting your search result once will do no one any good. You must remove the source! If the source has already been removed, go ahead and flag your search result, enter "Source removed" in the comments field, and we'll get rid of the Spock search result for you.

Someone is impersonating you

Please flag the search result, explain the situation in the comments field, and we'll assist you in getting it sorted out.

Our search isn't perfect (yet). If you think your search result could be improved, then we ask that you sign up and claim your search result. If your search result is deleted, we can't promise that we will never have information about you in the future.

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