Ark (search engine)

Last updated February 10, 2021

Ark is a personal search engine that uses filters such as hometown, current city, high school, college, gender, relationship status, employee, and interests, to search for new people, old classmates, old friends or acquaintances, and new business contacts. Features include managing users' inboxes from their mobile devices, and syncing data from their Yahoo, Aol, Gmail or Google Apps email accounts, while also finding information about whom they are communicating with.

History

Ark was part of the Winter 2012 Y Combinator class.^[2] The company was one of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC's 2012 Battlefield Finalists.^[3]

Privacy

Ark is a social search engine designed to help individuals filter, search, and connect with people they should know. Acting as a landing page, users have to authenticate their Ark profile, although unlike any other social media, the user’s data and information is already aggregated and used to create that user’s complete profile. Ark’s technology has been tested to make sure that each Ark user profile is frequently updated to ensure that each user’s recent offline and online are accurately represented. Ark does this by accessing the public data collected from Ark members, while adhering to the pre-existing privacy settings of other social networks. Ark only indexes publicly available data. The Ark search engine will provide users with a thorough search engine for people based on a combination of qualities and locations.

Related Research Articles

Paul Graham (programmer) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

Paul Graham is an English-born American computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb, cofounding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his blog, and Hacker News. He is the author of several computer programming books, including: On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). Technology journalist Steven Levy has described Graham as a "hacker philosopher".

Y Combinator (YC) is an American seed money startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch over 2,000 companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise Automation, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Twitch, and Reddit. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over US$300 billion as of January 2021. The company's accelerator program is held in Mountain View, California.

Meetro was a multi-network social messenger with location-based services (LBS). It was compatible with AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, GTalk, XMPP, and ICQ. Meetro's features made it useful for meeting people with similar interests in a given area, as well as bundling multiple messaging protocols into one program. Meetro was located in San Francisco, California.

Yandex N.V. is a Russian Dutch-domiciled multinational corporation providing Internet-related products and services, including transportation, search and information services, eCommerce, navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising. They provide over 70 services.

Microsoft Advertising is a service that provides pay per click advertising on both the Bing and Yahoo! search engines. As of June 2015, Bing Ads has 33% market share in the United States.

TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by partners of Archimedes Ventures, Michael Arrington and Keith Teare, and was acquired in 2010 by AOL for $25 million. TechCrunch is also best known for its Disrupt conferences, an annual technology event hosted in several cities across United States, Europe, and China.

Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr. It is an enhanced version of web search that combines traditional algorithms. The idea behind social search is that instead of ranking search results purely based on semantic relevance between a query and the results, a social search system also takes into account social relationships between the results and the searcher. The social relationships could be in various forms. For example, in LinkedIn people search engine, the social relationships include social connections between searcher and each result, whether or not they are in the same industries, work for the same companies, belong the same social groups, and go the same schools, etc.

Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.

Walmart Labs is an American subsidiary of Walmart in San Bruno, California. Their website earns revenue from advertising related to its categorization engine. The engine organizes the Internet into topic pages allowing users to explore the Web by topic, "presenting a dashboard of relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics". Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman founded Kosmix in 2005. In April 2011, Walmart acquired Kosmix and formed @WalmartLabs, a research division, out of it.

Crunchbase is a platform for finding business information about private and public companies.

Lu Qi is a Chinese-American software executive and engineer who is the head of MiraclePlus, a startup incubator in China. Previously, Lu was the head of Y Combinator China until it was shut down. He was formerly chief operating officer of Baidu until he stepped down in May 2018. He has served as executive vice president of Microsoft, leading development of Bing, Skype, and Microsoft Office, and software engineer and manager for Yahoo!'s search technology division.

Yummly is a mobile app and website that provides recipe recommendations personalized to the individual's tastes, semantic recipe search, a digital recipe box, shopping list and one-hour grocery delivery. The Yummly app is available for iOS, Android and web browsers. The Yummly app was named "Best of 2014" in Apple's App Store.

Qwiki was a New York City based startup automated video production company. Qwiki released an iPhone app that automatically turns the pictures and videos from a user's camera roll into movies to share. The company's initial product, an iPad application that created video summaries of over 3 million search terms, was downloaded more than 3 million times and named by Apple as the best "Search and Reference" application of 2011.

Socialthing was a social news aggregator that founded in 2007 and was acquired by AOL the following year for an undisclosed sum. Later renamed AOL Lifestream, the service was a central part of AOL's unsuccessful attempt to compete against upstart social networks such as Facebook.

Octopart.com is a search engine for electronic and industrial parts headquartered in New York, NY. It aggregates parts from distributors and manufacturers online, making them easy to search for and purchase. It is free for users, and as of August 2014, over 700,000 unique visitors search the database of 30 million electronic components per month. Octopart's mission is "to open up access to part data for design, sourcing, and manufacturing".

Strikingly is a website builder that allows the user, with little or no development experience, to create mobile optimized websites “within minutes”. The company takes a mobile-first approach, allowing users to create websites that are enhanced for viewing across all devices including desktops, tablets, and smartphones.

Daniel Gross is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Cue. In 2013, Cue was sold to Apple where Gross led machine learning efforts until joining Y Combinator as a partner in January 2017. Gross is also a technology angel investor and contributor to the technology news site TechCrunch.

HackerRank is a tech company that focuses on competitive programming challenges for both consumers and businesses, where developers compete by trying to program according to provided specifications. HackerRank's programming challenges can be solved in a variety of programming languages and span multiple computer science domains.

MailTime is a mobile messenger application for iOS and Android devices, developed by MailTime Technology Inc. in 2013. The application is known as "email messenger" which integrates the feature of email and text messages. MailTime operates as a freemium model.

Meesho is an Indian-origin social commerce platform founded by IIT Delhi graduates Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal in December 2015. It enables small businesses and individuals to start their online stores via social channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram etc. Meesho is headquartered in Bengaluru, India and was one of the three Indian companies to be selected for Y Combinator in 2016. It was also a part of the first batch of Google Launchpad - Solve for India program. In June 2019, Meesho became India’s first startup to receive investment from Facebook.

References

↑ Grossman, Sara (2012-05-09). "Startup out of UC Berkeley aims to revolutionize people search". The Daily Californian. Archived from the original on 2012-05-13. Retrieved 2012-05-09.
↑ Roush, Wade (2012-03-28). "The Most Interesting Y Combinator Winter 2012 Startups". Xconomy. Retrieved 2012-03-28.
↑ Eldon, Eldon (2012-05-22). "The Final Six Disrupt NYC Startups: Ark, Babelverse, gTar, Open Garden, Sunglass, Uberconference". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2012-05-22.

External links

Ark official website

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] Grossman, Sara (2012-05-09). "Startup out of UC Berkeley aims to revolutionize people search". The Daily Californian. Archived from the original on 2012-05-13. Retrieved 2012-05-09.

[2] Roush, Wade (2012-03-28). "The Most Interesting Y Combinator Winter 2012 Startups". Xconomy. Retrieved 2012-03-28.

[3] Eldon, Eldon (2012-05-22). "The Final Six Disrupt NYC Startups: Ark, Babelverse, gTar, Open Garden, Sunglass, Uberconference". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2012-05-22.

[1]

[2]

[3]