This past Wednesday, at the Web2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Social Search was the hot topic.

Photo by James Duncan Davidson

We were honored to be featured at the conference, testament to the growing influence that Aardvark has in the industry. We were in good company — the companies that were featured on Wednesday were Microsoft, the US Government (represented by the CTO of the United States), HP, Facebook, Aardvark, Google and MySpace. Very humbling… and very encouraging!

Everyone was talking about the various models of Social Search. It was clear that the intersection of search (people want to find information!) and social networks (people want information they trust!) is at the crux of the next generation of Internet experiences.

Max’s speech about Social Search set the stage for further discussion:

When you want to find information, there are two ways you do it: you can search for the information on the web, or you can ask someone you know. Generally the web is a great way to find answers to objective questions. By contrast, people have always been great at giving you subjective recommendations for travel tips, gift ideas, local activities, getting started on a project, and so forth.

And he explained why the time is right for Social Search today:

Web search engines emerged in the 1990s as a great way to find information when there was a critical mass of content online that could be indexed. Today, there is finally a critical mass of people online that can be indexed — and Aardvark is a great way to ask people questions in real-time.

This gets us incredibly jazzed here at Aardvark…
1. There’s so much more information in people’s heads than the fraction that is online; and
2. The average person in this room has tens of thousands of friends-of-friends, classmates, and coworkers. You could literally fill a stadium with that personal braintrust. With Aardvark you can get an answer on demand to the kind of subjective questions you can’t easily answer on the web from someone that has been picked for you from your network.

Five years ago, you couldn’t really take advantage of those incredibly valuable resources. But today, after years of explosive web 2.0 innovation, there is a critical mass of data about the people in your network that is available to 3rd parties through APIs.

Max also took the opportunity to give a status update on Aardvark, and where we’re heading:

To make sense of all this data — and analyze it in the moment for any query — is a web-scale search problem that we’re only starting to master. It’s taken our team of 20 engineers and machine-learning Ph.D.s two years to get here, and there’s absolutely no shortage of meaty problems to tackle ahead.

We reached a tipping point late this Summer where, due to scale and engineering improvements, the product really started humming. The path forward for us is now about incorporating more sources of profile and social graph data, and integrating with more web applications where people can ask and answer questions. Aardvark is ultimately about indexing and connecting people. All that incredibly rich real-time and real-world activity can be pulled together by Aardvark so that your questions get routed to the perfect person, and so that you get the questions you are most satisfied to answer. Increasingly, you can also give more direction to Aardvark and control most aspects of your experience as asker and answerer.

And to prove it, Max gave a quick live demo (exciting and scary!): From the stage, he asked a question about romantic restaurants in Boston… and got a great answer in 3 minutes

We’re looking forward to the next step…