After lots of speculation and rumours Google announced the purchase of Aardvark last week. Techcrunch reported that Google acquired Aardvark for $50 million dollars. The agreement was announced officially by Google through their blog. Aardvark CEO Max Ventilla stated that “We have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Aardvark, but we don't have any additional details to share right now”.
What is Aardvark?
A home coming of sorts for the ex Googlers, the founders of San Francisco based Aardvark. Aardvark is a question-answer search service allowing users to ask questions and get quick answers from their friends and other community members. When you complete a search query, the Aardvark search engine scans the profiles of your friends and returns their opinions and thoughts.
For example; If you are looking for the ‘best pizzeria in Toronto’, your pals from Toronto know what the best Pizzeria is and you get the best answer from them for this query. Aardvark lets you set topics in which you're likely to be questioned by your friends when you set up your profile. Aardvark is now available in Google Labs. Those want to have a look ate Aardvark's underlying technology and premise can read a detailed paper recently co-authored by Aardvark founder Damon Horowitz.
What Aardvark Means To Google
This acquisition helps Google strengthen their recently announced Google Buzz. By pushing Aardvark’s technology Google can make Google buzz even more useful by connecting friends, and friends of friends to return the best results. Google can also make use of this agreement to improve better their local listing service. This should effect local business pages and business reviews in the future as well. The future of Aarvark is only in the beginning stages for Google. Another smart purchase for the continually expanding company.
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I’m always fascinated with website acquisitions. Ultimately, they are designed to make the users experience an easier, more comprehensive one. Google purchasing Aardvark is just one more way the company is streamlining its services so that users don’t have to waste time and resources finding simple information. A very smart acquisition, indeed.
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I just signed up and it works great. information is passed through IM services like MSN messenger, yahoo messenger, gmail talk etc…
As soon as we sign up Aardvark will ask question theough IM and answers are provided within a short time through chat. We can also provide answers to the topic which we are familiar with.
Great way to ask questions and provide answers instantly !