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Posts Tagged ‘Social Search’

Aardvark Continues Running At Full Steam After Google Acquisition, Joins Google Labs

Yesterday we broke the news that Aardvark, the social search engine, was being acquired by Google for $50 million. Aardvark confirmed the acquisition to us yesterday (though they didn’t comment on the amount), and now Google and Aardvark have publicly announced the deal with posts to their official blogs, along with some more details about how Aardvark will be integrated with Google.

Unlike some of Google’s past startup acquisitions that  resulted in services shutting down or restricting new user signups, Aardvark is going to continue running at full steam.  New users can still sign up, and it’s already featured as part of Google Labs (though it hasn’t been integrated with Google search at all — it’s just a link to Vark.com).

As far as changes to the service, a Q&A on the Aardvark blog says that they’ll be able to move faster as Google puts its support behind it (some Googlers will be joining the Aardvark team).

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Facebook Takes Over Its Own Display Advertising From Microsoft, Keeps Bing For Web Search

When it comes to display advertising on its own site, Facebook is taking full control of its inventory away from Microsoft. Even prior to Microsoft’s initial $240 million investment in Facebook in 2007, the two companies had an advertising partnership giving Microsoft the ability to serve display ads on the social network. That was a three-year deal which was up for renewal. The two companies just finished renegotiating it, and Microsoft will no longer be serving up display ads on Facebook.

However, Bing will still power Web search on Facebook and will serve up search ads. The relationship with Bing will actually be expanded to be global (before it was just U.S.) and to include smart answers and other guided search features within Facebook. Expect Facebook’s Web search to start looking a lot more like Bing. As far as social search goes, however, Facebook continues to develop its own search technologies which return realtime results from your personal stream.

Handing over a large chunk of its display advertising to Microsoft made sense three years ago, but now that Facebook generates more pageviews than Yahoo or Microsoft it doesn’t need to split ad revenues on its own site with anyone. Facebook is still trying to figure out what kind of advertising will work on a social site, but it has so much inventory that its revenues are believed to be growing quickly.

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Aardvark Publishes A Research Paper Offering Unprecedented Insights Into Social Search

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin published a paper[PDF] titled Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine, in which they outlined the core technology behind Google and the theory behind PageRank. Now, twelve years after that paper was published, the team behind social search engine Aardvark has drafted its own research paper that looks at the social side of search. Dubbed Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine, the paper has just been accepted to WWW2010, the same conference where the classic Google paper was published.

Aardvark will be posting the paper in its entirety on its official blog at 9 AM PST, and they gave us the chance to take a sneak peek at it. It’s an interesting read to say the least, outlining some of the fundamental principles that could turn Aardvark and other social search engines into powerful complements to Google and its ilk. The paper likens Aardvark to a ‘Village’ search model, where answers come from the people in your social network; Google is part of ‘Library’ search, where the answers lie in already-written texts. The paper is well worth reading in its entirety (and most of it is pretty accessible), but here are some key points:

• On traditional search engines like Google, the ‘long-tail’ of information can be acquired with the use of very thorough crawlers. With Aardvark, a breadth of knowledge is totally reliant on how many knowledgeable users are on the service. This leads Aardvark to conclude that “the strategy for increasing the knowledge base of Aardvark crucially involves creating a good experience for users so that they remain active and are inclined to invite their friends”. This will likely be one of Aardvark’s greatest challenges.
• Beyond asking you about the topics you’re most familiar with, Aardvark will actually look at your past blog posts, existing online profiles, and tweets to identify what topics you know about.
• If you seem to know about a topic and your friends do too, the system assumes you’re more knowledgeable than if you were the only one in a group of friends to know about that topic.
• Aardvark concludes that while the amount of trust users place in information on engines like Google is related to a source website’s authority, the amount they trust a source on Aardvark is based on intimacy, and how they’re connected to the person giving them information
• Some parts of the search process are actually easier for Aardvark’s technology than they are for traditional search engines. On Google, when you type in a query, the engine has to pair you up with exact websites that hold the answer to your query. On Aardvark, it only has to pair you with a person who knows about the topic — it doesn’t have to worry about actually finding the answer, and can be more flexible with how the query is worded.



• As of October 2009, Aardvark had 90,361 users, of whom 55.9% had created content (asked or answered a question). The site’s average query volume was 3,167.2 questions per day, with the median active user asking 3.1 questions per month. Interestingly, mobile users are more active than desktop users. The Aardvark team attributes this to users wanting quick, short answers on their phones without having to dig for anything. They also think people are more used to using more natural language patterns on their phones.
• The average query length was 18.6 words (median of 13) versus 2.2-2.9 words on a standard search engine.  Some of this difference comes from the more natural language people use (with words like “a”, “the”, and “if”).  It’s also because people tend to add more context to their queries, with the knowledge that it will be read by a human and will likely lead to a better answer.
• 98.1% of questions asked on Aardvark were unique, compared with between 57 and 63% on traditional search engines.
• 87.7% of questions submitted were answered, and nearly 60% of them were answered within 10 minutes.  The median answering time was 6 minutes and 37 seconds, with the average question receiving two answers.  70.4% of answers were deemed to be ‘good’, with 14.1% as ‘OK’ and 15.5% were rated as bad.
• 86.7% of Aardvark users had been asked by Aardvark to answer a question, of whom 70% actually looked at the question and 38% could answer.  50% of all members had answered a question (including 75% of all users who had ever actually interacted with the site), though 20% of users accounted for 85% of answers.

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Why is Google Afraid of Facebook? Because Social Networking Could Soon Pass Search

It’s often said these days that Google and Facebook are major rivals, but how could that be if one is in search and the other, social networking? Traffic analyst firm Hitwise provided one very clear clue tonight when it published new numbers for web user activity in Australia. For perhaps the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive, Hitwise says. There is reason to question the company’s categorization of web traffic, but the trend is worth examining none the less.

Social networking climbed fast this year, and Hitwise says it just peaked over search for a few days during the communication frenzy of Christmas. Take that, Larry and Sergey – Mark and Ev are right behind you.

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The biggest problem with Hitwise’s numbers is that the company appears to include YouTube in the “social networks and forums” category that is challenging search. That’s a questionable categorization of (Google’s) YouTube, a site that some people call the 2nd-largest search engine on the web. A person certainly can use YouTube as a social network – but we’d guess that far more people use it as a search engine. If YouTube is growing (and this analysis says it is) then search is growing. You wouldn’t think search would have much room to grow, but YouTube demonstrates nicely that there can emerge new kinds of search at any time. Some people argue that real-time search is the next type that will emerge as a growth industry for the search market. Others point to social search and that kind of amalgamation could throw our search vs. social networking equation entirely!

The arguable mischaracterization of YouTube seems to throw a big monkey-wrench in Hitwise’s usually fabulous market analysis, but as a general trend social network is undoubtedly growing. At 2% of web use, according again to Hitwise, YouTube is a major player – but lets think about the rise of actual social networking sites relative to search.

What would it mean if social networking over-took search in terms of sheer visits online? It would mark a sea-change on the internet. No longer would our dominant use of the web be seeking out web-pages built by HTML web-masters! Now we would all be publishing tiny little updates that perhaps only our friends and family care about. We’d be subscribing, more than we ever did by RSS, to syndicated updates from organizations of interest, large and small. It would be (perhaps will be) a very different era and, to be frank, it’s going to be harder to monetize. There will be privacy battles. There will be new platforms for innovation.

It’s a pretty big deal. Things will really change if current trends continue and social networking rises to the top. That’s not as clear as this traffic analyst firm argues that it is, but it could happen. And that’s a big reason why Google and Facebook are rivals.

Classic post: Is YouTube the Next Google?

Check out our research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future.

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Facebook Launches Fellowship Program To Promote Social Computing Research

Later today, Facebook will be announcing the launch of a new Fellowship program, inviting Ph.D. engineering students across the United States who are working on fields related to social computing and other Internet technologies to apply for one of five valuable fellowships. The company has launched a new site for the program here.

Students chosen to receive a fellowship will have their tuition and fees paid for the entire academic year, a $30,000 stipend, $5,000 to spend towards a computer, and another $5,000 to pay for travel and conference fees. They’ll also have the chance to apply to a paid internship at Facebook for the following summer.

Here are some of the areas Facebook says it is interested in:

Internet Economics: auction theory and algorithmic game theory relevant to online advertising auctions.
Cloud Computing: storage, databases, and optimization for computing in a massively distributed environment.
Social Computing: models, algorithms and systems around social networks, social media, social search and collaborative environments.
Data Mining and Machine Learning: learning algorithms, feature generation, and evaluation methods to produce effective online and offline models of behavioral signals.
Systems: Hardware, operating system, runtime, and language support for fast, scalable, efficient data centers.
Information Retrieval: search algorithms, information extraction, question answering, cross-lingual retrieval and multimedia retrieval

Applications are due February 15, 2010, and the winners will be announced on March 29. You can find more details on eligibility at the site’s homepage.

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Photo Tagger Alerts You When A Picture Of You Appears On Facebook, Tagged Or Not

Israeli facial recognition tech startup Face.com made quite a splash when it launched Photo Finder, its first Facebook app, back in March. It soon followed suit with a new app called Photo Tagger, a tool that is capable of finding photos of people that were uploaded to Facebook albums even if they remained untagged by users.

The auto-tagging app was only available in private beta so far, but today the company is debuting the public version of Photo Tagger. It’s free of charge, and it’s awesome.

Here’s how it works: after you install the app on Facebook, you can select any public album (either their own or from friends). Photo Tagger then scans the photos, batches subjects into groups using its facial recognition technology and suggests tags for faces it has identified as such. Confirmed tags are then pushed directly onto Facebook, mirroring the social network’s privacy settings, and the result is a custom album made up of tagged photos.

You have to try it out to see how it works for you, but Face.com claims faces can be recognized regardless of facial expressions or the lighting, quality, backgrounds, angle and focus of the pictures.

This turns Photo Tagger into quite an impressive social search engine for faces on Facebook, where millions of images are uploaded to albums every week. It also doubles as a handy notification tool, because it has a system in place dubbed Face Alerts that lets users know when pictures of them appear on Facebook, with or without tags.

Face.com says the private alpha edition of Photo Tagger attracted over 30,000 users and identified 5 million faces on Facebook within three months.

For an alternative, take a look at what Polar Rose is doing.

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Google Social Search: Twitter And FriendFeed Highlighted. What About Facebook?

Last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage for two reasons. The first was to formally announce the Google/Twitter search deal, but the second was the show off a new product: Google Social Search. The on-stage demonstration was interesting, but left a lot of questions unanswered. Today, the Google Labs experiment goes live, and we’ll get those answers.

Social Search essentially pulls in information from social networks to augment Google search results. But a major question is: What social networks get pulled it? While the experiment isn’t quite live yet, it would seem that from the video below made by Google’s Matt Cutts, Social Search, at least at first, will be able to include results from Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Blogger, and Google Reader.

The last three are obvious since Google owns all of those. Twitter seems obvious too because of the new Google/Twitter search deal. FriendFeed is an interesting one though since Facebook bought that service in August. As expected, it doesn’t appear that Facebook data will play a big role in Social Search (if any), as Google and Facebook continue their social profile stand-off. Cutts makes it clear that public data is the key to all of this, and Facebook doesn’t exactly have the most public information. That’s too bad since Facebook is, after all, the largest social network.

Cutts explains that the idea behind all of this is to utilize your “social circle.” The key to populating this social circle is your Google Public Profile. On this profile, the different social networking profiles you list yourself as being a member of will be a signal to Google to scour those networks for social data to serve up in its new results.

Interestingly, in the second video below, explaining how Google Social Search works, a Facebook profile appears in the lists of profiles. But again, in all the experiments, no data from Facebook seems to show up.

For its social circle, Google is going deeper as well. For example, if you follow 100 people on Twitter, Google will look at their public updates when you search for things, but it will also look at the friends or your friends for even more data. This is similar to what FriendFeed has done in the past to help surface other information that may be relevant to you. Google calls this your “extended social circle.”

Google also uses your Gmail chat buddies to build out your social circle.

When it’s live, you’ll be able to find Social Search here on Google’s Experimental search page.

Update: And now it’s live.

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Top 50 Real-Time Web Companies

As part of our lead-up to The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, which is just over two weeks away, in this post we’re listing 50 leading companies of the Real-Time Web. Like any list, it is bound to be missing some worthy companies – so we invite you to list more in the comments. Our aim is to unveil the top 100 Real-Time Web companies at our event.

A reminder that the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit is happening 15th October in Mountain View, California. Many of the ReadWriteWeb team will be there, so we look forward to meeting and talking with you all! You can register here for the low price of $195.

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50 Real-Time Web Startups

These companies are listed in alphabetical order. Once again, please use the comments section to add other startups that should be on our radar. You can also of course voice your agreement or disagreement about our choices!

AllVoices; Breaking News, Current Events, Latest News and World Events.
bit.ly (betaworks); URL redirection service with real-time link tracking.
BoilingPage; Find popular webpages among people in real time.
Cleartext; Enterprise Messaging Software as a Service.
Cliqset; Merging, Organizing and Sharing Social Information.
Cluuz; Web search engine featuring semantic cluster graphs, image extraction, and tag clouds.
Collecta; monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media.
CrowdEye; Real-time Social Search.
Daylife; A point & click tool to create dynamic content portals.
Faroo; Real Time Search.
FirstRain; search-driven research.
Fwix; a local news site designed to show you the most recent and relevant information in your area.
Google; adding real-time web to search.
HighNote; Search, track and share the real-time web.
Insttant; Real Time People Generated News.
Isode; Messaging and Directory Server Software.
itpints; Real-time web search engine.
Jive Software; Social Business Software (SBS).
JS-Kit ECHO; next generation commenting system.
Kaazing; Enterprise Gateway extends real-time messaging and live data delivery to the Web.
Lexalytics; Sentiment and Text Analysis.
Liaise; an email add-on that analyzes the free-text contents of your emails as you write them.
MicroPlaza; Popular topics and news from the Twitter public timeline.
oneriot; real-time search engine.
PBworks; Collaboration, Intranet, Extranet, Project Management.
PeopleBrowsr; Social Search, Sentiment and Conversation Mining Dashboard.
Perpetually; keep up to date on your competitors.
PostRank; Discover the best blogs, find and follow topic experts and influencers.
Present.ly; a micro-blogging communication tool for your company.
Radian6; Social Media Monitoring, Measurement and Engagement.
Real-Time Innovations; Real-time messaging middleware and design expertise.
reddit; User-generated news links.
Scoopler; real-time search engine.
Scout Labs; web-based application that finds signals in the noise of social media.
Seesmic; manage your lifestream from Facebook & multiple Twitter accounts.
Shareaholic; An extension to share and bookmark web-pages on popular social sharing and bookmarking services.
Superfeedr; Real-time feed parsing in the cloud for web-developers.
Surf Canyon; Free Browser Add-On for Real-Time Personalized Search.
Sysomos; Business Intelligence for Social Media.
Thoora; delivering the news attracting the most buzz and discussion.
TIBCO; business integration and process management software company that enables real-time business.
Topsy; search engine powered by tweets.
tr.im; URL shortening.
Tumblr; light blogging service.
Tweetdeck; desktop Twitter client.
Twitter; micro-blogging.
Vayusphere; an enterprise software company dedicated to the acceleration of a corporation’s time critical and frequently used business processes.
WebTrends; Enterprise Customer Intelligence.
Wowd; a tool for finding popular information, in real-time.
Yauba; Privacy safe, real-time search engine.

Discuss

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