Yesterday we broke the news that Aardvark, the social search engine, was being acquired by Google for $50 million. Aardvark confirmed the acquisition to us yesterday (though they didn’t comment on the amount), and now Google and Aardvark have publicly announced the deal with posts to their official blogs, along with some more details about how Aardvark will be integrated with Google.
Unlike some of Google’s past startup acquisitions that resulted in services shutting down or restricting new user signups, Aardvark is going to continue running at full steam. New users can still sign up, and it’s already featured as part of Google Labs (though it hasn’t been integrated with Google search at all — it’s just a link to Vark.com).
As far as changes to the service, a Q&A on the Aardvark blog says that they’ll be able to move faster as Google puts its support behind it (some Googlers will be joining the Aardvark team).
Aardvark (formerly Mechanical Zoo) is a social search engine, founded by a group of former Google employees. Aardvark that lets users ask questions that are distributed to the social graph for a quick and high quality answers. It launched into private beta in 2008. Aardvark is a way to get quick, quality answers to questions from your extended social network. You can ask questions via an instant message buddy or email. The questions are then farmed out to your contacts...
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
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