Spock.com pacts with google, plays with ad networks

People search engine Spock.com, launched last fall, just became the newest member of , connection portals and hunt engines such as Ask.com, AOL and Lycos in displaying Google's AdWords ads.

"We just finalized the paperwork and are workings on the technical end," Spock co-founder Jay Bhatti told ClickZ News.

Spock is also in talks with literally all the major ad networks including the Yahoo publishing house Network, Glam, Tribal Fusion, Pubmatic, Advertising.com, and DoubleClick, as it experiments with contextual and show advertising on the site. Bhatti expects a formal launch of show ads in "two to three calendar month."

Spock (the name alludes not to "Star Trek," but alternatively is an acronym for "single point of contact by keyword") claims to presently serve some 6 1000000 search question per month, with query volume growing at a 30 percentage monthly rate. According to comScore, Spock.com had 275,000 unique U.S. Visitors and 601,000 worldwide in Feb 2008.

Its spiders crawl people data from disparate sources on the Web including social networks, directories, and sites, to create profiles of people that are searchable by multiple attributes, e.g. Tags, location, name, and electronic mail address.

Users contribute greatly to these profiles, creating new profiles and content on existing profiles, and "vote" on content already posted.

"We're not a sociable network," insists Bhatti, an important differentiator for a place intent on competing with MySpace and Facebook for advertizer dollars. "purpose and human relationship are hard to gaining control on sociable networks." Spock also screens its entries for the possibly offensive content that raises adjacency flags with brand advertisers on sociable networks.

Spock claims 30 percent of hunt volume is people related, and question are more or less equally split betwixt queries for the famous and ordinary Joes. Presently, Spock is testing various ads on the vote pages for famous person photos. Google's ads are in the right column, display ads at the top and bottom of the page.

Bhatti hopes to sell advertisers on reaching women, who conduct over 60 percent of celebrity searches, per company data. "We may not have a lot of women who are signed up and are contributors," he said, "but they're a large portion of the searchers on Spock."

Down the road, plans are to target ads to more descriptors in profiles, such as local information. The company has also had preliminary talks with major brand advertisers -- Bhatti named Nike and Target -- regarding potential awareness campaigns.

"When someone's looking at Tiger Woods and are coming from Germany, wouldn't it be great if they can see a Nike ad? " he asks, not so rhetorically.