Aardvark acquired by Google

Friday 19 February 2010 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

Social search service, Aardvark, has been bought by Google. The acquisition was announced last week and both parties have expressed their delight at the deal.

In a post on the Official Google Blog, Johanna Wright (Director of Product Management, Search) wrote:

"When you need an answer to a very specific question, sometimes the information just isn't online in one simple place…That's why we're excited to announce that we've acquired Aardvark, a unique technology company that lets you quickly and easily tap into the knowledge and experience of your friends and extended network of contacts."

The idea behind Aardvark is that a user can ask any question and the service will find the right person in the user's network to answer it within minutes. Aardvark analyses questions to determine what they are really about and then matches the question to people with relevant knowledge. Aardvark launched a private beta in March 2009, and has been growing rapidly ever since. Today users access the service via vark.com, the Aardvark iPhone app, IM and email. Popular search subjects include product, book, movie and TV reviews, as well as travel tips, restaurant recommendations, cooking ideas and IT help.

Continued Johanna Wright, "We're very impressed with the Aardvark team and the technology they've worked hard to build, and we're looking forward to collaborating to see where we can take it." Immediately after the announcement, Google made Aardvark available in Google Labs.

In a blog post, Aardvark founders Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz commented:

"Aardvark has defined a new kind of social search: sometimes you want a person, not a web page, to answer your question. We're extremely excited that Google shares our vision for how search can continue to evolve by including social features. We have spent the past two years carefully designing and building Aardvark, combining our own vision with a rigorous user-driven development process. This acquisition represents an incredible opportunity to accelerate this development, working with some of the most amazing folks in the industry to offer a new kind of search to hundreds of millions of people."

The post concludes with a series of questions and answers. To the query 'Are my questions and answers going to show up on Google Search?' the Aardvark blog answers:

"As always, your questions and answers are private by default, unless you choose to share them with your friends. Your questions and answers will show up in search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search results if you choose to share them publicly."

Back to industry news