A US web firm is preparing to launch an ambitious Internet search engine that it hopes will eventually track down the names of the world's six billion people.
Spock.com says it has already indexed 100 million people and is adding a million names per day on the invitation-only, beta version of its website, which will be made available to the public in mid-August.
The emergence of people search engines has sparked concerns over privacy rights. The sites Wink.com and Zoominfo.com already have 200,000 and 37,000 profiles, respectively.
These websites seek to carve their own territory in the search engine world dominated by Internet giant Google, which already has the distinction of becoming a verb, as anyone who has "googled" information would know.
"We are a search engine organizing information about people," Spock.com co-founder Jay Bhatti told AFP.
"How Google allows you to type anything and gives you a web document result, we give you results around people," he said. "That's how we differentiate ourselves from other search applications, because we are solely focused on people."
The founders of Spock.com, which has been under development since 2006 in Redwood City, California, hope the website will eventually provide a search result for ...   more »