Aardvark – Social Answers

Aardvark is a social network accessory. Its basic function is a cross between that of Google Answers and a social network search engine. Basically, people use Aardvark to help find among their social network, some person who might have an answer to a question the need to ask. To use Aardvark, you sign up; and then you put your question on the service, through an e-mail or an IM. Aardvark will then automatically tap all your Facebook friends and their friends, to find out if there are any willing volunteers who might want to help answer your question. What makes this kind of search really powerful is that it goes on beyond your immediate circle and extends to friends of all your friends; it is a potential pool of people who could number in the thousands.

It is easy to see the appeal of a service that will poll friends over strangers - even if the "friends" are people you've never met. The concept of Aardvark is to combine the power of asking people for advice with the trust people have in friends and acquaintances. But what if this results in having people being bombarded with hundreds of questions every day that they have nothing to say on? Aardvark has a special way to make sure that this doesn't happen. It divides up your potential pool of volunteers into small batches. It will ask your question of only one batch at a time and move on to the next only if it is unsuccessful with the first batch. And it will try to use personal information on your potential volunteers' Facebook profiles to judge whether that person has the interests that might make her a reasonable choice of person to ask. They found that they usually needed to poll no more than 8 to 10 people to actually get an answer. They still comb through thousands of potential volunteers to find the best prospects.

Go on Yahoo Answers about, say, what hotel to stay in when you go to South Africa, and you'll probably get a couple of stock answers from two years ago. Ask Aardvark, and usually you get a couple of great recommendations within a couple of minutes, and sometimes you can get more than you ask for; such as an alternative travel destination that would make more sense for the time of the year.

Google Answers never made the impact that Yahoo Answers did or even Ask.com. That last one has been the most successful. In fact in the whole question answering arena - it gets about 1 million questions a day. It has been so successful that it has come up with its own rival to Aardvark - a way to poll the entire extended friend circle a person has on a social network that could be a potential source of information. Google wishes to replace the Google Answers service that it closed down four years ago, with Aardvark, by buying it up.


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