Point Oh!

In the not so illustrious history of this blog, for reasons I can’t explain, posts on social search have always been the most popular.  I’ve contended for a long time that I think increasingly sophisticated SEO technology could prove to be the downfall of Google.  When brands with deep pockets effectively control organic search, I think most of the utility of Google will become quickly eroded.

For this reason, I’ve always been optimistic about social search engines like Mahalo.  Wikipedia has proven that a large highly-engaged user base can efficiently curate an unfathomable amount of content, possibly just as much as a legion of spiders powered by a siberian server farm.

I was even more optimistic when I began playing with Aardvark last year.  It had a great user base where I was living at the time (Portland, OR) and it worked equally well through IM, it’s iPhone app and the Web.  I was continually blown away by the quality of answers and recommendations I received and often tried to stump the system.  In many cases, getting user generated answers to questions was faster than sifting through Google, Wikipedia and the IMDB, especially from the mobile app.

For the past couple months I’ve been playing with another social search service called Quora.  While Aardvark is somewhat anonymous and streamlined, Quora is big on reputation and its content structure is more of a repository than an on-demand social tool.

I consider both these technologies to be social search engines, even though they’re positioned more as Q&A services.  They’re both different in many ways yet I consider them to direct competitors since the core functionality and brand promise is the same.  So which answers your questions better?

As an experiment to find out, I posed the following question to both services: “Which service is better at delivering quality timely answers to the widest range of your questions, Quora or Aardvark?”  On Aardvark, I posted it through the Web and allowed it to be auto-tagged as “aardvark” and on Quora I posted it through the Web and manually tagged it “aardvark,” “social search” and “quora.”  I also tweeted the question on Quora since the feature is so simple and easy to use.  I’m going to give both services three hours to answer.

Before we get to the results, let’s profile the pros and cons of both services.

Aardvark Pros

• Aardvark’s greatest strength is in it’s simplicity.  To use the service all you need to do it create an account and enter a question in any format
• Helping your questions find answers is easy through automated tagging based on a word scan
• There are multiple platforms to choose from that mimic the simplicity of the service
• Depending on your preferences, Aardvark will send you questions that are related to areas you’re interested in with a fair amount of success
• The user base is fairly broad in terms of interests

Aardvark Cons

• This may be just my experience over the past year but the user base seems to be less active than it was a few months ago
• You can’t really tell if the people answering your questions are qualified
• The platform isn’t designed to allow you build relationships with people that provide the best answers

Quora Pros

• Incredibly active tech-savvy user base
• Questions/answers are cataloged so you can find many answers without having to query your network
• People answering questions can often be confidently identified as experts
• You can follow topics that are of particular interest to you
• Quora answers will probably gain search relevance and be indexable on Google (eventually)
• Users can organize redundant questions to streamline the content (see my results below)

Quora Cons

• It generally take longer to get an answer
• There is a legitimate learning curve to the interface and architecture that could keep many non-techie but otherwise knowledgeable people away
• Many users leverage the platform for self-promotion and “friend collecting”
• The overall user experience is considerably colder and less welcoming than Aardvark

Conclusion

While both services are extremely compelling applications of user generated content, I find Aardvark, in it’s current form, to be a more promising technology.  If we’re really moving toward a “semantic Web” then I don’t think a social search service should rely so heavily on users to tag and organize their own content.  While building a large database of answers is a noble task, the end user benefits much more from on-demand answers.  Aardvark is also moving towards becoming a platform that is accessible anywhere and requires no real Internet or boolean skills to master.

Of course, the community will ultimately decide the winner.  In many ways, Quora is a feature-rich version of Yahoo Answers that provides more vanity tools for its users.  While it may not be directly incentivizing participation, allowing users to build status, authority and – the single worst metric of influence – their friend count will push many aspiring social media mavens to pour hours into the service where their contributions to Aardvark would go largely unnoticed.

…and the results of my experiment

Now that three hours have passed since asking both platforms “Which service is better at delivering quality timely answers to the widest range of your questions, Quora or Aardvark?” I have to say that the results were a little disappointing.

On Aardvark, the best answer I got was “Quora has answers for broad topics and Aardvark has answers to specific questions,” from a man in Bangladesh.  Other answers were along the lines of “it depends on the topic but I prefer Aardvark,” which is to be expected when you ask the question on Aardvark.  The result can be summed up as a series of quick opinions generally favoring Aardvark but it should be noted that I got my best answer within an hour.

The experience with Quora was quite different.  When I posed the question, it gave me a list of questions to see if the question was redundant but nothing on the list matched my question.  A couple hours later, before getting any helpful answers, a user scolded me for asking a redundant question and redirected my question to a simpler phrased version.  The number one answer within that stream actually praised the Quora UI and included “feedback loop around vanity” as a benefit of the platform.  The best answer, in my opinion, stated that Aardvark is “aiming to be a more real time service by focusing on algorithms to keep a rapid chain of possible sources for answers in place” while Quora ensures quality by offering “reputation rewards.”

Perhaps the biggest question here is whether or not people need to be incentivized to share knowledge freely online.  As a closer look at the Twitterati or any friend collector on any social network will show, “reputation rewards” are often an empty promise.  While Robert Scoble may have achieved some notoriety for his high friend counts on every social service he participates on, most real industry leaders exist completely outside this bubble.

If this kind of rewards system is necessary to ensure the success of the platform, Aardvark will have a tough time surviving.  However, if usability and overall user experience is really the mark of a successful technology then Quora probably has a little work to do before it becomes a clearly dominant platform.