In February of 2010, Google purchased a social Q&A site, Aardvark. It seems like a great match, for a couple of reasons. One is that a paper from Aardvark that attracted a lot of attention, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine (pdf), written by Damon Horowitz and former Googler Sepandar D. Kamvar, was admitted by its authors to be inspired by one of the early Google papers, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Another is that Aardvark’s founders and senior team members include a number of former Google (and Yahoo) employees.
Instead of looking for web pages that might answer your questions, Aardvark enables you to ask questions of people in your expanded social network (and beyond), and to identify topics that you might be interested in answering. While there are a number of Question and Answer type sites on the Web, such as Yahoo Answers, those don’t send out questions quickly to people who might be able to provide an answer, but rather rely upon people maybe happening upon your question.
A Yahoo patent application published this week explores a “communal search” system where someone might get real time responses to questions from people who might know the answers. People chosen to respond to questions might be selected based upon their location, activities they participate in, or some relationship to a location or time and the query. This system may also attempt to automatically answer queries based on previous questions and answers from others who have used the system.
Continue reading “Yahoo’s Social Search Answer to Google’s Aardvark?”
