Aardvark- Human Powered Social Search Engine

Found a new search engine which searches through so-called experts who can answer the question to give a human touch to your online queries.

Aardvark was conceived as the first Social Search engine: a way to find people, not web pages, that have specific information. So people are hooked up as experts on a few self chosen subjects, and they are the ones who answer your questions!!

In February 2010 Aardvark was acquired by Google, and continues to operate as part of the Google family of products. You can ask any question to  on vark.com , and you shall get a crowd-sourced answer online/ on your iPhone/ via Gmail or MSN chat/ through Twitter and many other social media channels.

It claims to find someone to answer your question within 5- 10 minutes.

What should I use Aardvark for?

• Recommendations
• Research help
• Advice and second opinions
• Tips and discoveries
• And more…

Questions come up every day…

• When you need a quick answer, but don’t want to search through a bunch of web pages.
• When you want information but don’t know who to ask or where to start.
• When you don’t have time for a long conversation with someone.
• When you want someone who knows what they’re talking about.

They sure have got a lot of press, though when i asked a question, it took aardvark.com about 7 minutes to put me in touch with a dumbo who hadn't really understood the question. I guess it needs more people on board to make a bigger impact.

• 2/5/2010 - New York Times: A Search Engine That Relies on Humans
• 2/2/2010 - TechCrunch: Aardvark Publishes A Research Paper Offering Unprecedented Insights Into Social Search
• 2/2/2010 - O'Reilly Radar: Forget Google, social search is all about mobile
• 1/19/2010 - MacWorld: Aardvark Mobile
• 1/14/2010 - PBS: Q&A 2.0: There's More Than One Way to Answer a Question
• 1/1/2010 - Scobleizer: Hot Startups to Watch in 2010