Back in October, we wrote a research paper entitled “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine” and submitted it to WWW 2010. We found out last week that it has been accepted, so we wanted to share a preview with you today!
Our paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual [...]
Author Archives: Damon, Lion Tamer
Damon Horowitz
Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine
The Research behind the Aardvark
We’ve invested heavily in advanced research since we started Aardvark two years ago. This is an unusual move for a small startup company, which is expected to spend all of its time on a panicked frenzy of short-term releases. So why did we do it?
Well, we noticed that the explosion of online information about people [...]
The Real-Time People Web
In the past several months, there has been a surge of interest in the explosion of real-time information now available online. With Facebook status updates and Tweets now ubiquitous, we have entered the era of the “real-time web”. Everywhere from Mountain View to Paris, technologists and pundits are gathering (offline!) to ponder and promote it. [...]
Aardvark Numerology
Things have been going extremely well since we started allowing open signups a month ago.
So we’ve put together a few benchmarks to evaluate progress on our core metrics — the challenge is only how to interpret the numbers…
Aardvark is Fast
8 minutes – median EMS response time (hopefully)
4 minutes 30 seconds – median time to first [...]
Send questions to Aardvark from Twitter
Now you can ask Aardvark a question via Twitter:
Just include ‘@vark’ and a question mark (’?’) in your tweet
Aardvark will find the perfect person to answer, and Direct Message you their response in a few minutes
(Set up Aardvark to recognize your Twitter handle here: http://vark.com/profile/accounts)
You could tweet something like…
“What’s the best new sushi restaurant in [...]
A Forum for the Aardvark Community
Everything we do at Aardvark is driven by the feedback we get from you, our users. We believe that by combining our vision for Aardvark with the ideas and opinions of our community, we’ll be able to build a service that can truly change the landscape for how people find information and connect with each [...]
On Aardvark Research
We have a pretty simple definition of research here at the zoo:
Identifying difficult user problems and turning them into solvable engineering problems.
There are three different kinds of research we do under that general charter…
1. “User Experience” — This is our qualitative user research work.
We constantly monitor the user experience for unintended funkiness, and also for [...]
How did you go about designing an Aardvark?
One of the things we’re most proud of at the company is our product design process — how we groom Aardvark for prime time.
What’s our process?
Well, it all stems from a pretty simple principle: Put your most creative ideas in front of all kinds of people, see what they think, throw out the junk, try [...]
Aardvark in 20 words or less
Aardvark is a newfangled world-changing thingumabob.
Which is to say: We’re still trying to figure out how best to describe our critter.
The way we’re integrating different technologies to help connect people is pretty innovative (or so we think). Thus, we often find that folks who haven’t experienced Aardvark firsthand don’t know quite what we’re talking about.
Here [...]
Social Search is the New Search
First of all, what is Social Search?
Social Search is finding information from real people.
Just like Web Search provided a revolutionary way to find web pages that have the information you’re looking for, Social Search is a revolutionary way to find people that have the information you’re looking for. In both cases, intelligent search indexing [...]