Posts Tagged ‘social search ’
The buzz around Q&A startup Quora has been building steadily over the past couple of months. I measure this not only by the number of Follow messages received concerning people randomly sampled from my Facebook connections which are now flooding my inbox, but also by the heated debate that is developing about the site’s usefulness, much of which is chronicled in this TechCrunch article about the “Quora Backlash Backlash”.
So, in a seemingly inevitable, but nonetheless surprising move, Google has purchased Aardvark for $50 million. My last blog post was about Aardvark’s recent paper describing their social search engine, which included allusions to the research paper which was responsible for the creation of Google, so the announcement seems timely.
Earlier this week, the team at Aardvark unveiled a new paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine” which will be presented in April at WWW 2010. Inspired by and patterned after “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, which describes the PageRank algorithm which drives Google’s search ranking system (which as Aardvark’s blog points out, was also presented at WWW 12 years ago). The paper, by Aardvark’s Damon Horowitz and Stanford’s Sep Kamvar, focuses mostly on the architecture of the Aardvark system, from the external representations with which users interact to the internal ranking algorithms on which the system runs. Below, I present a short summary of what they report, focusing on the elements I found most interesting.
