USA Today
14 Oct 2009
Advice Search Engines Use Your Friends To Provide Better Results
Jon Swartz
Search isn't just for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo anymore.
Despite their market dominance, there are pockets of opportunity as more consumers search results for breaking news and obscure trivia. That has put a premium on help search services that provide answers in real-time on topics ranging from recipes and car repairs to movie and restaurant recommendations.
Aardvark is a good example. Today, it unveiled a redesigned site (design credit Method, www.method.com) and repositioned itself as a "social search engine." The site can be accessed via Facebook Connect, Twitter, iPhone and instant messages.
Aardvark is one of several advice searches, but its results depend on the expertise of one's social-networking friends, friends-of-friends, classmates and co-workers. Other services, like kgb and ChaCha, are similar but with trained "guides." Yahoo Answers is one of the biggest players in the space.
"Consider Aardvark your very own brain trust of experts who are ready to help within minutes," says Damon Horowitz, Aardvark's co-founder and chief technology officer. "It searches for people's knowledge and experience that they may not have written, but is in their head."
