Today, social search jocks Aardvark published a research paper entitled Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine that looks at the science of how people find things with help from other people.

According to Damon from Aardvark, the “paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, in which Sergey Brin and Larry Page originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference.”

One of the most interesting points made in this paper is that the subjective way in which we often ask questions is better served by social search than it is by web search. Makes sense to me, especially with those questions we’re trying to answer that

require interpretation of context. Also curious are the findings that the v

ast majority of questions (almost 90%) get answered, with a decent amount of answers (70%) earning a “good” rating…. not bad if you ask me.

So, how credible is the paper? Well, it was co-authored by Sep Kamvar, founder of search company

Kaltix (later acquired by Google) and previous head of Personalized Search at Google, now Professor at Stanford. I’m no academic, but that seems pretty damn credible to me! Think it has anything to do with Sergey and Larry dumping enough shares last week for them to relinquish their majority voting rights? You tell me…

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