Berteloot

Aardvark which “definitely plan to expand to other languages in the future – just trying to perfect it in English first,” according to Alison Johnston, Aardvark Community Manager, has just issued a great paper on the fundamental differences between the traditional “Library” paradigm of web search — in which answers are found in existing online content.

Aardvark explains that in social search:

• Users can ask questions in natural language, not keywords
• Content is generated “on-demand”, tapping the huge amount of information in peoples’ heads
• The system is fueled by the goodwill of its users

Damon, Lion Tamer writes “We demonstrate that there is a large class of subjective questions — especially longer, contextualized requests for recommendations or advice — which are better served by social search than by web search. And our key finding is that whereas in the Library paradigm, users trust information depending upon the authority of its author, in the Village paradigm, trust comes from our sense of intimacy andconnection with the person we are getting an answer from.

We also provide a detailed analysis of user behavior, and include dozens of interesting statistics. For example, of the 90,361 users we had in October 2009…

• 87.7% of questions sent to Aardvark got answered (very high answer rate!)
• 75.0% of users who asked Aardvark a question also answered a question for someone else (very high participation rate!)
• 70.4% of answer feedback had a rating of ‘good’ as opposed to ‘ok’ or ‘bad’ (high quality!)

Writing a paper like this requires being more open, and sharing more information, than most small internet startups might be comfortable with. But we recognize that we have benefitted from the open culture of the scientific community, and would like to do our part. Further, we think that the opportunity presented by social search is truly significant, and we’d like to engage with the rest of the research community on the many challenges it presents. There are very interesting problems to explore around question classification, analysis of social relationships, person-to-person matching, maintaining a question/answer economy, and many other areas.”

Read more on Aardvark blog