Ark is a personal
search engine
A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
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.
The service aggregates "ghost profiles" from social media outlets such as
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
,
LinkedIn
LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job se ...
, and
Angel list
AngelList is a U.S. website for startups, angel investors, and job-seekers looking to work at startups. Founded in 2010, it started as an online introduction board for tech startups that needed seed funding. Since 2015, the site allows startu ...
.
The company was founded by Patrick Riley and Yiming Liu in March 2012. Prior to founding Ark, the team worked at
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
,
AOL
AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017â ...
,
Symantec,
Lithium
Lithium (from el, λίθος, lithos, lit=stone) is a chemical element with the symbol Li and atomic number 3. It is a soft, silvery-white alkali metal. Under standard conditions, it is the least dense metal and the least dense solid el ...
and
Yahoo! Research
Yahoo!, once one of the most popular web sites in the United States, is as of September 2021 a content sub-division of the namesake company Yahoo Inc., owned by Apollo Global Management (90%) and Verizon Communications (10%). It has offered a wid ...
. Ark is based in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
, California.
History
Ark was part of the Winter 2012
Y Combinator
Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Str ...
class. The company was one of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC's 2012 Battlefield Finalists.
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.
References
{{reflist
External links
Ark official website
Search engine software
American companies established in 2012
2012 establishments in California