Search engines are the second most used service on the Web after email. They index Web pages then match user keywords against these pages. They are simple yet powerful, and that’s probably why they remain undefeated as a user’s first resort when looking for information on the Web. No fancy sentences required, just a few keywords that summarize what the user is looking for. This is what makes search engines powerful. They are extremely easy to use and provide “responses” in real-time.

Social Bookmarking

Though not as common or heavily used as search engines, social bookmarking services were the new kid on the block circa 2005, and although they are not primarily search tools, they do offer, by ricochet, pretty good search capabilities. Users would share their finds on the Web and tag them for others/themselves to find later. It is these tags that make Social Bookmarkers great info search tools as they provide additional categorization that Search Engines often fail to infer. Of the several social bookmarkers available back then, there was Delicious which was acquired by Yahoo at one point. Given its large user base (and consequently a large index), one could find quality hits/answers on it sometimes even before they were indexed on Google. We’re talking about a time when twitter had barely started and real time search was at its infancy.

Human Powered Search

When a search engine response is deemed too generic or the information is altogether absent on the Web, Question and Answer services (also referred to as human-powered search services) are it. When a more personalized “search” experience is sought, it is to these kinds of services that users turn. QnA services remove ambiguity from search as they allow the formulation of proper sentences. These sentences are presented or routed to other users to provide answers on. As such, the response quality is often better than the automated one given by a regular search engine.

There is currently a plethora of QnA services which compete over a growing user base including (to name a few): Yahoo answers, FormSpring, ChaCha, UClue, JustAnswer.com, Quora.com, Aol Answers, AnswerBag, the old Mahalo – before it got morphed into a HowTo video site, probably as a result of Google “Panda” updates - . Google had its own answering service back in the day as well, before it shut it down in 2006 most probably because it couldn’t be scaled as desired, or its  monetization in Googlistic proportions was hard.

Social Search

The past 3-4 years have seen a new breed of human powered search services emerge. These relatively new players, dubbed social search services, leverage social network connections on facebook and/or twitter to locate people with answers. InboxQ, Wajam, Aardvark (acquired by Google in early 2010) and Quora are among some of these new sites. Social search finds its rationale in the fact that users often resort to people they know/follow and trust for answers.

The road ahead

There’s certainly a lot to be done when it comes to knowledge search on the Web, and despite what has been done so far, we haven’t seen the emerging of a leader yet. We believe that with the wide adoption of services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as the ubiquity of mobile technology, it is now even easier to find and reach experts right where they are.  We also think at expulp that human powered search, as it is currently implemented, falls short in at least the following respects:

1. Qualifying experts: when a user is properly qualified and his/her expertise/interest areas are known, they are better targeted with relevant questions, and as such, they are more likely to give an answer.
2. Proper question routing: the model which consists in users exploring a list of questions and giving answers where they can, has proven to contribute in littering questions with sub-par answers, or sometimes not resulting in answers altogether. Question routing is key and should take into account the expertise/interest areas of a user, the social connections (when applicable) as well as a user’s geography.
3. Answering speed: ideally a question would get an answer in real-time. With all things human, speed is unfortunately limited but services that can shorten the turnaround time for a question will undoubtedly be successful.

As we move towards a more connected society, the likes of Expulp, Aardvark and FormSpring will become more mainstream. The Googles and Bings of the world will probably still be  the #1 stop for information and knowledge search, but they will most probably evolve to also include human powered search capabilities, just like they evolved in the past few years to include map services, business directory services, flight search, etc. … The acquisition of Aardvark in 2010 by Google is a strong signal on how the search arena of the future will be shaped. A patent recently filed by Google confirms this vision.