A Search Engine That Relies on Humans, By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN, New York Times (Feb 5)
Aardvark does "social search" - its members connect with each other in communities - and answer each others questions from the whole range of internet connected tools.
The founders wrote a paper - Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine that will be discussed at WWW2010.
What's it about?
"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."
Some questions about social search that really should be considered before depending on it or investing a lot of time.
+ Is someone going to answer your question? Do people have time for this?
+ Does the person answering your question actually know anything? Can you trust them?
+ Is one answer sufficient?
Social search will not suit all types of questions. But as is quoted in this article from the paper - "We [Aardvark] demonstrate that there is a large class of subjective questions — especially longer, contextualized requests for recommendations or advice — which are better served by social search than by web search."
Posted by Gwen at February 9, 2010 06:04 PM