Aardvark - Social Search Engine

Aardvark is working on creating social search engines. As of October 2009, Aardvark had about 90,000 users.

Social search aims to connect people with questions to people who can answer those questions.

The idea has gained momentum with the increased use of Twitter and Facebook, where people rely on their networks for information, blasting queries to their social networks and, if their networks are good enough, getting useful, personalized responses. Some people who think social search has the potential to go beyond Google and fundamentally change the way people use the Internet.

Aardvark uses various factors to identify who it thinks are the best people to answer a question, then poses the question to them. Among the things it tries to determine are the expertise a potential answerer has about a subject, how closely connected the two people are, and how quickly the answerer is available.

On Aardvark, it only has to pair you with a person who knows about the topic — it doesn’t have to worry about actually finding the answer, and can be more flexible with how the query is worded.”

But there are also some significant shortcomings to Aardvark’s approach. Getting answers through social search requires someone else to do something, so it cannot produce the instant gratification that comes from typing something into a Web search box and watching a page of results appear. For Aardvark to be successful, it needs to enlist the participation of competent answerers. (Aardvark says that more than half of the questions posed received an answer within 10 minutes.)

There is also the question of whether or not to trust the answer one gets through a social search. How do you know if the person who answered your question is qualified to answer?

According to Aardvark’s report, the most common questions being asked are restaurants and bar recommendations, product reviews and help, local services and travel. And, as with all new buzzy technologies, a sizable chunk of the questions people are asking are about Aardvark itself.
Source: nytimes