In a nutshell 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.

Aardvark is the six million dollar social search engine from Mechanical Zoo and has been developed by several ex Google and Yahoo staff. They hope that a social search engine will be successful in attempting to tap into the knowledge of it’s users and provide users of Aardvark with human answers to human questions via internet messaging or email.

Using Aardvark social search will give you Dr. Dolittle super powers


I’ve been using it now for about 2 weeks and thought i’d share my experience.

I received my invite into the via an online forum and signed up via their website. The signup process was easy enough, you specify your interests and then punch in the usual sign up details. After that Aardvark tries to contact you via your nominated IM program. I was initially unable to get this working with Windows Live Messenger.

After spending about an hour playing with settings and adding and re-adding the service via Aardvark’s website I gave up and fired off an email to support. “Tim” from Aardvark support responded in under 24 hours and said it was strange it wasn’t showing up and he’d like to look into it. He said he’d re-added my Windows Live ID again and asked if I’d received it. I replied no I hadn’t and I never heard from Tim again.

I left it for about a week waiting for Tim to contact me and after 6 or 7 days figured it wasn’t going to happen so I figured I’d try once more and if it didn’t work just forget about it for good. To my surprise this time it worked.

0 points to their support team but at least it was now working.

After the bot contacts you via MSN it then checks your ID on Facebook’s database (and presumably others but I don’t use any other social networking sites) and asks if you want to sync your Facebook contacts with your Aardvark account. I was a bit reluctant about this at first but if you don’t give Aardvark access it whines at you to ‘complete your registration’ every time you send off a question.

I don’t think anyone on my Facebook profile was spammed but it does then check their email addresses and see if they are using Aardvark, it also gives you the option to invite them. Obviously this information is stored somewhere yada yada tin foil hats disclaimer but if you really cared about your privacy you wouldn’t be using Facebook anyway.

Once set up Aardvark shows up as a contact in your IM program, conveniently up the top unless you have contacts with weird screen names. The way it works is you simply treat it like a person and ask it a question. It then tells you it’s firing the question off and you just sit back and wait for a reply.

In terms of answering queries from other people, you can specify your topics of expertise and how and when Aardvark contacts you. I currently have only a few topics of interest and have found Aardvark contacts me roughly once or twice a day to answer something. When Aardvark contacts you it lets you preview the question and then gives you the option of responding or passing.

Reply times for my questions varied from 10 minutes or so for ‘are shops open on good Friday in Melbourne?’ (this was answered by some guy in India!), to 3-12 hours for “what’s a good vegetarian restaurant in <my suburb>”. I received an answer to the vegetarian questions within 3 hours of asking and received an alternative answer from someone else roughly 12 hours later.

Not surprisingly when I asked ‘Why does beef taste better then chicken?” I didn’t get any answers, although the status of the question in my profile reads “still looking for an answer” so there’s hope yet.

The questions Aardvark was able to find answers for however were focused and very useful. The only drawback I could see was that, for example, if I punched in “vegetarian restaurants in <my suburb>?”  into google I got a list of answers in about a second.

Whilst I doubt social searching will replace web site searches any time soon it’s definitely proven itself to be a useful unobtrusive search companion to have.

Aardvark is currently an invite only system and I currently have 20 invites (it seems to give 10 a week) so if you’re interested in trying it out drop me an email, link is on the top right of this page. I’ll need an email address, your first name (or screen name I don’t care) and at least 3 topics of expertise you’re comfortable about answering questions about.

Additionally, feel free to share your own experiences with Aardvark in the comments below.

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