Ark (https://ark.com 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.

The service aggregates "ghost profiles" from social media outlets such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Angel list.

The company was founded by Patrick Riley and Yiming Liu in March 2012. Prior to founding Ark, the team worked at Google, AOL, Symantec, Lithium and Yahoo! Research. Ark is based in San Francisco, California.

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

What Happened?: Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2012, Ark sought to map the "social graph" to help users find, for example, "friends who live in New York and are single". It was seen as a competitor to Facebook's own, then-unreleased Graph Search.

Ark’s initial success was built on accessing Facebook’s user data. However, Facebook eventually restricted access to its data, particularly friend data, which severely limited Ark's ability to operate as a comprehensive people search engine.

Following these restrictions, the company shifted its focus. By September 2013, Ark launched a new product described as a "Rapportive-meets-Mailbox" app, which used social data to provide context about people in your inbox.

The Results: The company aimed to be a "neutral" alternative to Google and Facebook for personal search. Following the pivot, the company did not reach widespread mainstream adoption, and the original, independent Ark people search engine, as it existed in 2012, ceased to function in its original capacity.

After initially gaining traction and raising a $4.2 million seed round, the company underwent significant shifts due to changes in data access policies by major social networks.

As of 2026, we want people to bring back the defunct personal search engine Ark and we want Google, Yahoo, AOL, TechCrunch, Facebook, Bing, LinkedIn and AngelList to help bring back Ark.

We want people to sign the petition to bring back Ark, a defunct social search engine rather than a traditional web search engine and they want to help their respective partners Google, Yahoo, AOL, TechCrunch, Facebook, Bing, LinkedIn and AngelList. #BringBackArk.com #BringBackArk