Social search has been a concept that has been thrown around for years.  But what is it?  It is hard to define really as it can describe many things on a wide spectrum.  One common vision is most simply put as leveraging your social network to properly find, rank, and display search results on the web.  For instance, users can vote up or down on the quality of a result in response to a specific user query and help refine the algorithm (or supplement the algorithm) used to determine results.  Maybe comments or reviews from people are included as well.  Since your social graph is unique, closer connections will weigh more heavily in the process, and (at least in concept) you will acheive more personalized, relevant results.  In short, you will find what you were looking for.

This makes sense, at least at the most basic level.  None of the major players are doing much with it yet.  Some are experimenting; no one has found the right fit to be sure.  But it will be commonplace at some level in the near future.  You can count on that.  What about all those answers that aren’t on the web though? (Yes, they do exist).  Or what if you just don’t have time to research to get what you want?  For all the useful information on the Internet, sometimes nothing is better than knowledge transferred directly from one person to another.

In comes Aardvark.  Aardvark is made for those times.  On their company blog, co-founder Damon Harowitz describes the service as “a newfangled world-changing thingumabob.”  The name is funky as it is, and this description doesn’t help much.  But his point is valid: its a great new service that is hard to describe but easy to love once you figure it out.

It’s fast, personal, relevant, and easy.  Check out the flow of the product in this image I pulled from their site:

Check out the site.  Right now the service works online via the website and instant messaging clients, and on your mobile via email.  Soon it will work via SMS on mobile and an iPhone app is coming too!  They are also continuing to make the service more intelligent, pulling in data from major social networks and other places to learn how to pair your question with the best person to answer.  It joins the list among my favorite online services and I will defintitely keep an eye on its maturation.  You should too!