Spock, a vertical search engine focused on people, went live today and we all rushed out to see what it thought of us. Wait, that was just me then?

I admit it. I’m so vain I think this blog post is about me. I rank #1 for my name (all those years of hard work at being me have finally paid off!) and one thing I find interesting is the tags associated with me. Are these Technorati tags? Spock-generated tags? Whatever the case, I’m pretty proud of my (nine!) tags.

• Google employee
• weblog
• blogger
• aol
• Google
• Search engine optimization
• kirkland
• blackberry
• Zillow

You can not only add new tags, but you can vote on existing ones. Oh the possibilities.

I don’t have a Blackberry anymore, but now that I know I have a whole tag for it, I want to keep writing about it. But why is AOL a tag for me? Maybe because I used to work there? I’m sad I have no pictures. I suppose they don’t have Flickr images indexed and they don’t seem to be pulling images from Wikipedia either, so I’m not sure where they’re getting the images they have.

I don’t exactly get the social networking aspect of the site other than I suppose you can find your friends and tag them. And I just don’t have the energy for more social networking.

You can also claim yourself and upload all the information about yourself that you want, which makes it somewhat of a cross between Zillow’s claim your house feature and Wikipedia. I think I’ll be lazy though and wait for it to start pulling data from more sources. And when it starts claiming that I was born in 1928 and my main hobby is wandering through empty fields with my metal detector, well then I might set the record straight. Not that my real hobby of trying out new applications on my mobile phone by the flickering light of my laptop makes me look much better.

My initial thought is that I rarely do a search for a specific person. And then I remembered that I did one just this morning with dismal results. So, I tried the same search on Spock. Just as dismal. To be fair, this person may not have much online information available. Which is a whole other perspective on people search — we’ve become so used to searching online that we forget that not everything we need may be online and searchable. (I know! Crazy!)

When I do people searches, it’s primarily for business information — who does this person work for, what is their experience, where do they live? LinkedIn generally gives me pretty good results for that. (Facebook probably would with its recent growth, but since I can’t see the profiles of anyone not in my network, searching doesn’t do me much good. I don’t need to find out what my friends are doing. I already know that.)

However, there are lots of other reasons to search for people and I suppose Spock’s advantage is that it can provide a variety of results for more than one search motivation. Well that and anyone reading this can go add whatever tag you think describes me best. Just don’t add “metal detector afficionado”. “Two cell phone carrier”, “coffee-powered”, and “perpetually online”, however, are all fine choices.

Update: I thought I might claim myself, because after all, I am me. First, I had to create an account, which created another profile of a person with my name. So then I was two. When I tried to claim myself, I got a message that I had to email Spock to do it. Odd, since with most of the other profiles, you are prompted to log in to LinkedIn or MySpace. I have a profile on LinkedIn, and added it in my account’s profile, but to no avail. So, I did the wise thing and emailed.

You might expect that with a launch and all of us searching for ourselves and to see what Spock might say about our exes, they might be a little busy. But someone emailed me back within a few hours to say that she had merged my profiles and my login now owned the entry on me. (And that the reason I couldn’t claim online is that I don’t have a LinkedIn account, and while I indeed do, it turns out that wrinkle was the least of my worries.)

Great!

Or, not so much. The original profile, the one linked above that ranked #1 for my name? Now 404s. And all the information from that profile? Is located in a new entry at the end of the exact matches (page 4). Because my new profile is so new, it ranks last. And everything from my original profile has been moved there.

I replied to the cheerful email that had informed me of my good fortune in claiming my name, explaining that the reward for claiming was not as filled with joy and laughter as one may have expected. And now I wait. Last. At the end. Clearly, I have learned my lesson. Being lazy does indeed pay off in the end. (More news as it happens.)

Update 2! I sent the email asking about my sad plummeting ranking late last night (OK, it was like 1:30 am, but I was out that late with good reason! I was at Ignite Seattle (which was awesome, by the way) and then I had to play werewolf (yes I was the werewolf; yes, I went on a murderous rampage and won, so clearly it was worthwhile staying up).) I just got this response (less than twelve hours later):

Your search result hasn’t been re-indexed yet, which is the source of your concerns. I reset your URL to spock.com/Vanessa-Fox. Check back in a couple days, and things should be set.

So, while things may not be running like a well-oiled machine over there (and can anyone really expect that of a small company, just launching?), they are super responsive and their emails are signed by actual people. I know all too well that might not be scalable, but I also know how important it can be to listen and respond. And yes, the tables have now turned and now I’m the one emailing, asking why I’m not number one. Commence mockage…. now.