Internet resources: Google make use of social services

According to The Washington Post Google has acquired a social search service Aardvark. In December two companies carried out negotiations and now the deal has been signed. The Aardvark service lets users ask questions and get immediate responses from their friends and friends of friends.

Earlier this month Aardvark published a research report that included some key stats about their business: 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 questions per day. 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 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. 87.7% of questions submitted were answered, and nearly 60% of them were answered within 10 minutes. 70.4% of answers were deemed to be “good”, with 14.1% as “OK” and 15.5% were rated as “bad”.