Comments on: Aardvark Burrows Out Of Beta

By: Go Shopping, Be Social | The Noisy Channel

Go Shopping, Be Social | The Noisy Channel — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:42:25 +0000

[...] the perfect person in your network to answer…in under 5 minutes!” As I’ve commented before, I think they need to embrace the philosophy of “when in doubt, make it public“. [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:43:02 +0000

Alison Johnston, community manager at Aardvark, wrote me an email to address the concerns I raised in this post, and I reproduce it here with her permission:

1. Our routing algorithm is constantly improving the more people use Aardvark, so you will only see it get better. Just so you know, if you see an issue, you can also retag any question topic, but typing “tag: ” followed by the desired topic.

2. We are currently in the middle of user testing to find the best balance between public and private. We’ve received a wide variety of feedback from users–everywhere from wanting every question to be searchable to not even wanting questions stored on personal profile pages or in Aardvark database. Your feedback on this issue is helpful and will definitely be taken into account.

By: Posts about Michael Arrington as of June 27, 2009 » The Daily Parr

Posts about Michael Arrington as of June 27, 2009 » The Daily Parr — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:38:09 +0000

[...] about Michael Arrington as of June 27, 2009 Aardvark Burrows Out Of Beta – thenoisychannel.com 06/28/2009 I just received an email from Max Ventilla, CEO of social search [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 01:08:22 +0000

Actually, it strikes me as one of the better candidates for an ad-supported business if you can get people to use it. It’s all people-powered except for maintaining the infrastructure, and may offer far better targeting than general web search.

But that is a very big if. Getting people to use a service like this instead of a general web search engine won’t be easy, even if they do everything right.

By: Daniel Lemire

Daniel Lemire — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:53:17 +0000

Some years ago, I was part of a “research project” to build something like this, using rule engines and RDF. I left the project because I did not see it as very practical.

It strikes as even less practical as a business.

But then, again, I would not have invested in Google.