From AllThingsD
People-Search Engine Ark Raises Biggest Y Combinator Seed Round in Memory
By Liz Gannes
People-search start-up Ark.com has led a bit of a charmed existence. Part of Y Combinator’s winter class, it debuted to the public shortly after YC leader Paul Graham posted an essay about “frighteningly ambitious ideas” — with No. 1 on the list being “a new search engine.”
At Y Combinator’s Demo Day, a short Ark pitch delivered in the midst of 64 other start-up presentations got the company commitments for $2 million in funding in a single day. And more than 250,000 people have signed up for Ark beta invites....
Ark is almost too good to be true — a search engine that combines public and personalized search for people. It promises to transcend the current stalemate in social search between Google, Twitter and Facebook.
And it actually is too good to be true — right now, Ark is basically a simple interface to sort Facebook profiles by current city, gender, school, work, interests and other categories. Only 15,000 people have gotten beta access, as Ark has already fully maxed out its Amazon Web Services account by searching their networks and public data.
But Ark CEO Patrick Riley, who was previously working on his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, is clear about his ambition. “Google seems so out of touch without the rest of us,” he told me last week. “They’ve lost their neutrality.”
The rift between Google and Facebook leaves social search dramatically underdeveloped, Riley said...