i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Spock is a people search engine that uses a "man + machine" approach that includes text extraction and tagging to build pages about people. Spock crawls and indexes "people-related" web sites and augments this with editorial and social oversight.

http://searchengineland.com/spock-people-search-with-a-man-machine-appro...

I've always felt creeped out by these types of sites, which seem to be involuntary social networks and incredibly inconsiderate about privacy concerns. However, identity on the web is an incredibly important and difficult problem, so a Google for People site may get some traction if it can surmount the significant hurdles to organizing the massive set of personal data online.