Aardvark is a search engine founded by ex-Googlers, that uses social network power. It is not based on information created by users and than indexed. It is distributing the query among your afiliates and their afiliates, who find themselves good at different fields - if you’re lucky you might get the answer. Idea is not stupid, or rather decent. User can ’search’ by using IM, e-mail, SMS or Twitter.

To increase probability of being answered you should take care and gather as much friends in the service as possible, which is a little bit hard especially at the begging after releasing public beta version. But there is an option to grab the contact list from Facebook connect.

After typing in the query the algorhytm searches for person that is most probable to have knowledge about what user is aksing. Than user just have to wait for the answer. Basis for poining on specific user as the one who has appropriate knowledge is the fact that he introduced himself as having knowledge on particular field, coming from specific region or interested in something user asked about.

It looks like this sort of human powered search is one with completely new approach. It is interesting how many degrees of affiliation can be potentially used. However it can be a great source of help and really practicl information in some cases. Except for that Aardvark looks like it is going to be not only the source of information but also sort of place to make friends and have fun.

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At Gord Hotchkiss’ site we can find interesting interview with dr Teena Moody from UCLA’s Semel Institute, who conducted survey on how human’s brain work during searching the web. The research is based on the method name as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Main goal of this research was to find out on the scale of differences between human’s brain work during reading and searching the web. Another dimension of the research was to check if there are any differences between different grops of people - heavy users and novices.

Magnetic resonance revealed that brains of novices, named by dr Moody Internet-naive persons, during searching the web behave at the same way as they were reading, on the other hand heavy users’ brains work more activelly, more brain centers are active. Especially front and limbic lobes are being used by heavy-searchers. These two lobes are responsible for making decisions and conflict settlement.

Brain centres active during searching the web for heavy-users and novices:

Explanation for that fact is quite simple, using the Internet changes our brain work procedures, people who do not use Internet everyday behave like children in the mist - they just fell lost in new enviroment and act like they were reading it, gathering the information to get the full scope of view. However heavy-users make decisions basing on the information the just have found in perfectly known enviroment.

This partly supports thesis that using Internet changes our brains.

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Junoba is a head’n’shoulders of search engines - it is a 2 in 1 application. One of its functions is aggregation of social bookmarking services topics and the other one is ability to search through these services. Among them user can find Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Reddit, Propeller and Mixx. It does not work on any new algorhtym, but it uses Google Custom Search technology. It is another decent initiative that uses GCS tools - recently I wrote about KidRex that is also based on Google Custom Search.

Idea of searching through web 2.0 services is not new, I bet that everybody interested in SE business can name at least few engines that search through social web services. However searching through bookmarking services is fresh idea. It is a great tool to get information a little bit different to mainstream media news. Junoba can help in reducing the meaning of agenda setting effect - users can learn which opinions are really popular on specific fields.

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True Knowledge released new version of its product, you can try freshly improved features and smoothed inequalities. True knowledge as answer search engine aspire to analyse query semantically and serve its users a ready answer.  At the moment TK can connect facts and objects from database of almost 120,000,000 facts and 5,000,000 things. These amount of data is impressive. But is it enough to give precise answers for all questions that users might like to ask?

Probably it not enough, as long as human’s creativeness is not limited and world still goes round. More important thing is how efficient TK is in analysing queries. It deals quite well with precisely formulated queries like “date of birth of William Shakespeare” but it has problems with “when william shakespeare was born?”. It looks like this is a sort of a law that using semantical search engines users have to use plain equivalent elipsises. However TK sometimes struggles with more complicated questions, the mechanism of narrowing the search or giving the engine some hints on how to interpret your query, it does good work.

If you found answer, you’ve just got from TK, not satisfactory or not true you can take ‘disagree’ option and add knowledge that is more relevant in your opinion. While adding the knowledge TK ask series of questions that avail it to precise how interpret that knowledge - see the screen shot below:

TK has enourmous potential to become one of most accurate answer search engines. Service structure is already well developed, at the moment its owners should face the need of gathering varied gruop of users eager to contribute by expanding databases of knowledge. Bigger amount of data ready to be analysed should eliminate problems with queries interpretation.

To learn more watch True Knowledge video demo below:

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WikiWorldBook is a worldwide adress book, that aggregates results from most popular social web services, such as digg, facebook or twitter. Idea of WWB is based on self+organisation of users in order to improve possibilities of managing our own online reputation. We can not only search for people by giving their names and narrowing such a search by adding more precise details. It is also possible to browse adress book by alphabet letters like in traditional -  paper yellow pages. Results are acquired not only from social web services but they come also form general search engines (these are displayed in separate section, below social web results).

There are two main goals that creators of WWB want to achcieve - enable users to find or refresh contacts. Secondly - to manage our online reputation by giving us context that our name appears in relation to. It is also possible to get an alert with information when our name is being Googled (only for registered users). Users can also inform their friends about services they have accounts in and distinguish their accounts as private or business ones.

WikiWorldBook except for enabling to search for personal data is a Web 2.0 service, that contains structures as blogs, massage boards and everything we knew from other social web services, including profile pages, where we can aggregate all our personal data.

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