Aardvark Revamps Site, Becomes “Social Search Engine”

Aardvark has redesigned its site and repositioned somewhat as a “social search engine.” The site can be accessed directly, via IM, Twitter and the iPhone. You can also sign in using Facebook Connect, which sends your activity on Aardvark back to your news feed on Facebook.

What Aardvark is trying to do is not new — there have been Q&A sites for some time — but it’s trying to execute as a better version of the concept of peer-to-peer advice or answers. Once could also call this “human powered search.” Services like kgb and ChaCha also try to do something similar but with trained “guides” or agents rather than one’s network or friends of friends. Yahoo Answers is arguably the incumbent in the space.

Aardvark’s IP is all about question routing and management. I’ve been using Aardvark off and on for a few months and it generally works well and delivers answers (up to four) in a few minutes. The most compelling incarnation of the service is on the iPhone in my view.

The big challenge for the service is to prove that it can deliver more trust, precision or value than a Google search.