Social Search: Human answers to human searches
The idea behind a social search engine is tapping into the knowledge of web users in a non-obtrusive yet effective way. If you’ve ever typed in a “human” question into google for example, often times the web results can drift off topic exponentially the more specialised your search query becomes.
Social searching is a relatively new concept where instead of extracting information from websites, the search engine utilises it’s users knowledge. The ultimate aim of a social search engine is to provide human answers to human searches.
I’ve recently roadtested Mechanical Zoo’s social search engine, Aardvark and in using it identified some key challenges that I feel need to be looked at if the concept is ever going to see mainstream popularity.
Social Search vs. Google search
The biggest competitor to social search engines is undoubtedly the existing search engines out there. A lot of the questions I was getting through Aardvark could have been easily answered in 2 seconds via a Google search and I did feel like simply just replying back ‘google it’ on more then one occasion.
I feel that the long term viability of Aardvark (and other social search engines once it catches on) are in their ability to deliver specific answers to localised questions. A Google search of say “vegetarian restaurants” will give me a list of restaurants in my immediate area it won’t necessarily give me any personal recommendations without further investigation on my behalf.
ie. I could get a list from Google and then go off and hopefully find a restaurant review site and plug them in one by one.
This is where a social search engine easily trumps google as the results you are getting back are from real people and you are getting recommended suggestions rather then just a blanket list.
Obviously the effectiveness of Aardvark will grow as it’s userbase does but that in itself has it’s own problems, for example spam and the ‘nagging effect’.
The Nagging effect
The makers of the Aardvark describe quite an ideological view of social searching.
Social Search lets you tap into the wisdom of your social network through real conversations — it’s an easy way to access the knowledge and experience of people you’re connected to.
Realistically though once the novelty of answering other people’s questions wears off social search engines will most likely run into the problem of too many question askers and not enough “experts”. For knowledgeable users using a social search engine could quickly turn into the nagging little brother or sister you never asked for.
Currently I can only tell Aardvark to not contact me when I’m offline or my instant messaging program lists me as away or busy. There’s no limit to the amount of questions I might receive in a given day. Currently it’s one or two but over time Aardvark also expands your expertise topics so it could potentially blow out to an infuriating number of questions being thrown your way over time.
Short of capping the amount of questions you receive I’m not quite sure how to deal with this, I know that all it would take is just a few days of relentless questions for me to probably stop using the system altogether.
Spam
Currently Aardvark is invite-only meaning you have find someone willing to invite you to use it. Presumably at a later date when membership is opened up I don’t know what they plan to do to stop spam bots signing up to the system with random email addresses, picking the most queried topics as their expertise and spamming urls.
Sure you can report spammy answers to Aardvark but a bot doing this might send out thousands of responses before the account is shut down. Now what happens if there’s 1000′s of bots doing this.
I think currently the reason Aardvark is so useful for localised queries is because of it’s relatively low userbase. I hope Mechanical Zoo have a system is place to deal with potential spam later down the track as I see it as the second biggest hurdle next to competing with search engines to succeed.
Legal Liability
Given you can ask anything and receive a human answer I wonder how legal liability is going to work.
For example say if I received the query ‘is it safe to mix Valium with alcohol?’ and I’d had a bad day and replied ‘yes it is 100% safe’ and somebody went and died, when the cops rock up and see the query on the monitor, surely they’re going to want to speak with Aardvark.
Am I liable for the information I give out over Aardvark or is Aardvark? These are questions that whilst haven’t been tested now will surely be raised as Aardvark and other social search engines gain popularity.
Making money off social search engines?
Once the backend is complete the business model for a social search engine is attractive. Users provide both queries and answers, all you have to do is make sure your the system is online, the backend is accurate and spammers are dealt with.
But where does the money come from?
Internet messaging doesn’t really lead to advertising. There’s only a set message length per message and advertising could very easily clutter the message box reducing the competitiveness against a web search tool, which has the entire browser real estate to play around with.
There’s also a mobile phone option in the works where either via an Iphone app or SMS users will be able to interact with the Aardvark service. This provides even more of a challenge for Mechanical Zoo to raise revenue as stereotypically the only way to make money via SMS services is to charge a premium for the end user to receive them.
Aardvark currently does offer email as a method of communication but I don’t really see that as taking off. Compared to the convenience of using a messaging client sending emails isn’t really a useful option unless perhaps you were travelling a lot and combined Aardvark with a web based email service. It is however currently the easiest medium for Aardvark to work advertising if they choose to go down that revenue path.
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