36 InformationToday
June 2010 www.infotoday.com
www.infotoday.com/linkup
Neighborly Advice Takes a Village
by THOMAS PACK | consists of finding the right person, rather than
the right document, to answer your question.”
W
hat’s a social search engine? Ac- The difference between how you find in-
Edited by
cording to Aardvark (http://vark formation in a library and in a village sug-
Loraine Page gests “some useful principles for designing a
.com), it’s “a way to find people, not
Web pages, that have specific information.” social search engine,” according to the paper.
Before the web, social searching could have “In a library, people use keywords to search,
been called simply “asking your friends a ques- the knowledge base is created by a small
tion.” But social searches in the digital age number of content publishers before the
harness the power of online networks to help questions are asked, and trust is based on
you find the best answers more efficiently. authority. In a village, by contrast, people use
Social search engines might even revolu- natural language to ask questions, answers
tionize our online habits. “There are some are generated in real-time by anyone in the
people who think social search has the po- community, and trust is based on intimacy.”
tential to go beyond Google and fundamen- Of course, the village paradigm works much
tally change the way people use the Internet,” tertainment recommendations; product re- better for such questions as “Do you have any
Link-Up Digital according to The New York Times Bits blog
(http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/
views; movie, TV, and music recommenda-
tions; business and school research; home,
good babysitter recommendations in Palo Alto
for my 6-year-old twins? I’m looking for some-
is a semimonthly a-search-engine-that-relies-on-humans). But cooking, and gardening ideas; career and re- body that won’t let them watch TV.”
“social search will not replace conventional lationship advice; and tech help. But you can To answer this type of question online, a
updated, web-only search,” say its proponents. “Instead, it will ask Aardvark anything. social search engine needs “very different ar-
become another tool for Web users.” chitecture, algorithms, and user interfaces
section featuring
Using Aardvark’s social search tool is than a search engine based on the library
How It Works: It Takes a Village
articles, reviews, fundamentally different from doing a Google paradigm,” according to Horowitz and Kam-
search but also from using such sites as Aardvark was founded in San Francisco in var. However, they also note that “[t]he fact
and more for savvy Yahoo! Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com), 2007. A series of beta releases in 2009 made that the library and the village paradigms of
where anyone can ask and answer questions on the service available via email, AOL’s Instant knowledge acquisition complement one an-
users and producers
any topic, and JustAnswer (www.justanswer Messenger, Twitter, and iPhone. Last October, other nicely in the offline world suggests a
of electronic .com), where people pay experts for answers. Aardvark publicly launched its social search broad opportunity on the web for social in-
(See the February 2010 issue of IT for an ar- service on the web; then in February, Google formation retrieval.”
information products ticle about JustAnswer.) acquired the company for $50 million. Aardvark is exploring this opportunity by
On Aardvark, a question is routed to your Damon Horowitz, one of the Aardvark offering a search engine that lets you use
and services.
friends and the friends of your friends. But founders, and Sepandar Kamvar, Aardvark in- your existing profile data and the existing
using Aardvark is also different from using vestor and Stanford University consulting pro- data about your social network from Face-
Twitter, where you can just blast a question fessor of computational math, released a pa- book or your email address book. (