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.

-mw

Sweetsearch is a extraordinary search engine due to whole process of indexing instead of being automatically conducted by crawler is done by humans with their hands, we can say. This procedure’s aim is to provide results of highest quality and selectivity level. Each site has been marked by a team of Internet researchers (from Dulcinea.com)by the angle of content, quality and reliability.

The only advatange that this sort of Web search has in my opinion is the fact that we do not get search spam in the results. We can be sure that we will find only serious sites among our results. But on the other hand there are many doubts like: is index also created by humans?, are these “Internet researchers” competent in each field?. Human powered search is a new trend by rather at community level. Such a solution crosses out whole idea of democratic rules in the search business.

-mw

Topicle is a search engine that connects concept of vertical search with social search. Registered users contribute by adding websites to created categories that from than are searchable by Topicle. It also contains some element of personalised search - process of adding new category is named “creating engine”. It is about adding few URL that are found to be most relevant to the category.

All created search engines/categories are editable by all users, so outcome of work of different members of community can turn out efficient and relevant. Naturally this kind of search is built on trust so it adds some risk of time waste to its use, especially in business search, but on the other hand we can count that there is somebody thinking exactly like ourselves so this choice might turn out to be success.

-mw

When one faces the deluge of information one of most important issues becomes the fact of credibility of information we get from the Web. There are methods of setting the track record for particular websites (based on monitoring the site’s credibility), but there’s no guarantee that the site we find trustworthy would be among the results for particular query. Answer and remedium for this problem, can be Google Wiki Search, that enables to mark up specific site (for example the one we consider to be a good source of information). This site would be always at the top of search results site, when we search for terms that can be boiled up to the same category (for example try financial crisis and credit crisis).

In this case we can observe completetly new approach - giving credibility status with web tools is individualized, previously there were start-ups basing on social suggestions, Eurekster or Mahlo, just to give examples. But in this case we were forced to trust the community - which in fact remained anonymous. These services are not closed, opened social services that gather opinions from enthusiasts who, in many cases, lack the elementary knowledge in specialized disciplines, like for examples economy, medicine or others. On the one hand - it is the silent bauty of Web 2.0 - every amteur can become an expert, but on the other hand during searching the Web to get the information essential to your company or research it can just complicate things and waste our time.

Trust if of course the basis of each society (at least these highly developed ones), but wasn’t the web since it beginning a meritocratic phenomenon? I do not claim that democratization of Web is something wrong, it is good, it enhances the flow of opinions and provides another areas of potential business-making but… user-generated content affects the web credibility. In the field of retrieving credible information, that can determine the success of our venture or our client’s venture it seems that it is better to trust competent people. Social marked search results can be useful just for preparing the popularity ranks among particular web communities and at a pinch to get the opinion of web users.

-mw

Yesterday Bernard Lunn from ReadWriteWeb wrote a post about so called human powered search. He gave some pros and cons of using services such as Mahalo or About.com. I agree that main idea of creating such a services is creditable, this is also one of most important reasons for running this blog - to learn how to eliminate search SPAM.

According to Lunn the biggest hurdle would be breaking the ‘Google habbit’, as he names it. Yeap, I agree, the most beatiful thing in Google’s algorhytm is that it is most democratic one, the more hists your site has the higher in rank you are. Unfortunately in many cases, what shows up in search results is spam, but obviously it’s not spam for many other people.

In this situation we can do two things: invent more effective search methods or find new search engines. Is the human powered search and solution? I don’t think so, at least now. Still too little topics were wokred out and at the same time to-be-processed information multiplies each second toghater with the demand for it. What programmed algorhytm can process in few seconds takes minutes for human being. It is impossible to keep up the information deluge.

There’s something more - costs. Every venture has to make profit. Human’s work is the most expensive at the market. It seems impossible to create general human powered search, but it looks more probable and less insane to create some specialized one using already existing resources, for instance - newspapers archives (maybe the About.com owned by NY Times) or some medical database. A niche can guarantee that the information surplus won’t get on top of us. But on the other hand we already have something like that, I mean Wikia or Squidoo.

The difference between Wikia and Squidoo is that they are communities processing information from their passion, not for profit, but Mahalo employs people to process the search results. The question is: will it turn out to be profitable or will it be transformed into not-general search service? I think it won’t revolutionize the information serach market - people will still be using Google, just because it is like democracy - citing Churchill - nothing better was yet invented.

-mw