Searching the Village: Models and Methods for Social Search.

The article looks at an online social question and answer site called Aardvark that uses the village paradigm to route user queries to members of that person's social network who are likely to have the correct answer. An overview is provided of the key elements of the program, including indexing of user social network resources, analysis of informational questions, and ranking algorithm of accessible resources. Also discussed are statistical patterns of Aardvark searches and answers, as well as an evaluation of Aardvark results as compared to those from the Google search engine.