Spysee is a person search engine that uses semantic web technology to collect and deliver search results about people, similar to how traditional search engines deliver results on keywords and search terms.
According to the W3 Consortium, semantic web technology is “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines,†meaning it makes the data more readable by computers by further filtering the information. As such, it minimizes the need for humans to decide the data’s relevance, the computer figures it out for you based on your input.
At our first ever Japan Night (in collaboration with btrax), CTO Tomobe Hironori explained how Spysee’s search engine crawls the web to extract data from pages, then extracts specific details such as personal data, rich media like images and videos , links that are related to the person and finally organizes it and delivers it to the user in a nicely organized visual search results page.
Asked about generating revenue, Hironori said “we plan to embed advertising as our primary modelâ€. Though free now, in the future, varied levels of subscription services might be among their offerings.
Hironori said Spysee’s first customers have been sales teams, focused on finding the “right†prospects, adding, “Human search is one part of the search, but we use keyword extraction, image and movie retrievals to find unexpected informationâ€.
Spysee search results are presented visually to the user, a feature he noted is particularly useful in cultures where graphics are important, in countries like his native Japan for example.
Just this year, Spysee has seen a 23% increase in use. Considering that the site is only accessible in Japan, they’re pleased with these results and look forward to consistent growth.