martinibuster - 9:54 pm on Feb 11, 2010 (gmt 0)

The paper describing what underlies Aardvark and what it does:

Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine
[vark.com...]

Good reading.

...while trust in a traditional search engine is based on authority, in a social search engine like Aardvark, trust is based on intimacy. We describe how these considerations inform the architecture, algorithms, and user interface of Aardvark, and how they are reflected in the behavior of Aardvark users. ...Since social search is modeled after the real-world process of asking questions to friends, the various user interfaces for Aardvark are built on top of the existing communication channels that people use to ask questions to their friends: IM, email, SMS, iPhone, Twitter, and Web-based messaging.