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March 27th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Let’s say you’re a young woman who has just moved to New York City from Nepal. You want to find a friend nearby who speaks your language, so you visit Google Search and type “Women in New York City who speak Nepali.”
Google returns an academic paper that highlights “demographics and challenges,” a flyer for a fundraiser and a profile of a tenth grader.
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“She doesn’t know the name of her future friends,” Ark co-founder Patrick Riley says about this frustrating search scenario. “That’s how search engines have failed us for too long … People don’t necessarily know the name of what they’re looking for. They just know these qualities of people.”
Ark reconstructs search to make it effective for finding people. Instead of searching for a key term, users can filter through qualities such as gender, employers, current city, hometown, relationship status, college and interests.
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The startup indexes publicly available information from social networks such as Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, China-based Renren and European social network VK to deliver results. Although users can privately save the profiles Ark returns as results to their accounts, they must contact the people they find through the search engine using other channels. It’s trying to be a search engine, not a social network.
Riley says one of its most frequent beta users is indeed a young woman who moved from Nepal to New York City. She can search for people from her hometown that now live nearby — currently, there’s no way to do that through Google.
Ark also enables queries within your existing social media connections under a separate tab (you can find, for instance, friends who have birthdays next month).
By searching both within and outside of your pre-existing social graph, one search engine will locate friends who live in the city you’re visiting, old classmates you aren’t necessarily connected to on social media, people who work for the company you’re hiring at or that girl you met at a party last night.
Facebook once had a similar function for discovering people within your school with specific qualities, but it was long ago removed. Ark picks up where the world’s biggest social network left off and adds public social data from across the Internet in the process.
It’s one of the only products outside of dating sites that leverages social data to make connections without confining users to their online social graphs.
“We’re so into our social graph,” Riley says, “This need for randomness, this need for meeting new people has to go through something like GrubWithUs … [our question was] can we actually reconnect parts of society outside of the social graph?”
Eventually, Ark’s founders — both former graduate students who studied search at UC Berkeley — hope to offer a premium feature that gives users the option to show up toward the top of certain search queries. Riley describes the vision as “Google AdWords for people,” a metaphor that underscores how specific Ark searches can be.
“People want to power-search for people,” he says. “People are ready for that.”
Are you? Let us know in the comments.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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