Search Engine code contest by Spock - earn up to $50,000!
Spock, the search tool for discovering information about people, will launch it private beta on Monday at the Web 2.0 Expo, along with a $50,000 programmer contest. Spock, an industry leading people search 
application, helps users find and discover people on the web. With over one hundred million individuals indexed and millions added every day, Spock is the largest and most comprehensive people specific search application. Spock aims to index every person in the world. The service aims to organize the web’s information around people, and considering the amount of people in the world, and the amount of people-searching that goes on via the Internet, it’s quite a goal. But with the sharing of personal information on social networks, and the shift in placing information on the web in image and video-sharing sites, wikis, and the likes, it will become increasingly important to have a better search that can span the various ways in which this information is spread across the web.
Spock is also conducting a contest to find a programmer or a team of programmers that can offer up the best way in which to cluster the web information found on a given person. The main problem in need of a solution here is of course seeking out a way in which to organize the data in the most accurate way. The contest will have a prize of $50,000 and possible employment at Spock, and is a tried and true way to get the world’s best minds working on one of Spock’s core issues (Netflix did the same when looking for a better movie recommendation algorithm).
From the contest web site I quote
“To improve our technology and to create a better user experience, we decided to share the fun! We have selected one of our most interesting problems, namely Entity Resolution, to share with the community, allowing other leading computer scientists and engineers to compete in an open contest. The winners of this global competition will reap a handsome reward, and perhaps even employment at Spock.
You can work individually and in teams. The competition will last 4 months and the winning team will win a Grand Prize of $50,000! Most importantly you’ll be working on a very important and widely applicable problem. We will also be issuing prizes for 2nd and 3rd place.”
Details of the Identity Resolution problem have also been described on the web site as
“A common problem that we face is that there are many people with the same name. Given that, how do we distinguish a document about Michael Jackson the singer from Michael Jackson the football player?
With billions of documents and people on the web, we need to identify and cluster web documents accurately to the people they are related to. Mapping these named entities from documents to the correct person is the essence of the Spock Challenge.
In order to constrain the problem so that it can be successfully solved by an individual or a small team, we provide you with real world data with ground truth. This data contains 100,000 documents about people, and the challenge is to determine all the distinct people described in the data set. This data can be your training set. Once you’ve got your basic algorithm working against the training set, we let you further tune your code by running it against a second test data set.
We give you instant accuracy feedback in the form of a percentage rank score. The score depends on how many correct unique people you can identify in the data. This way you can continue to refine your work and see how well you are holding up against your competitors.”
So if you think you have it in you give it a shot and try it out if you can resolve it! Go ahead and register at http://challenge.spock.com/register.
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