Article 4; A Search Engine That Relies on Humans

The article titled “A Search Engine That Relies on Humans”, written by Joshua Brustein of the New York Times, is the subject of today’s post. The main focus of the article is to compare and contrast social search engines such as Aardvark to the other search engines that have no social component, such as Google.

The article briefly explains the difference between the two types of search engines. “Aardvark uses various factors to identify who it thinks are the best people to answer a question, then poses the question to them.” Whereas Google was said to “take questions, break them into keywords, and then find web sites that have the most relevance to these keywords”.

Neither of the methods for searching on the web was considered superior to the other. Proponents to the social search regime stated: “Social search will not replace conventional search. Instead, it will become another tool for web users”. Aspects of both types of search engines are still needed for web users. The benefit that the relatively new social search has is with subjective searches. Aardvark writes: “We demonstrate that there is a large class of subjective questions — especially longer, contextualized requests for recommendations or advice — which are better served by social search than by web search”.

Main Article:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/a-search-engine-that-relies-on-humans/?ref=technology

Second Article:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091020-124311