Google is working fast and furious to streamline their product offerings. Just a couple weeks after killing off all but one of the projects in their Slide division, today comes another death: Aardvark.
Co-founder Max Ventilla says the service will shut down at the end of this month. We broke the news of Google and Aardvark talking in late 2009. By February 2010, they had a deal: Google bought… → Read More
Social Q&A services are springing up everywhere because often search is too cumbersome or imprecise to answer our questions. This is especially true on mobile phones. A new iPhone app called Crowdbeacon attempts to answer your questions with a local twist. It is designed to answer questions about restaurants, shopping, services, and activities in your immediate vicinity. The answers come… → Read More
About a week ago, word started getting out that Facebook is beta testing a new “killer app” called Facebook Questions. For beta testers, the Questions feature appears in the left-hand column just below Events and Photos. It lets you ask and answer questions to and from your extended circle of friends.
A few days ago, Facebook opened up the private beta further and is now taking applications for… → Read More
When word first got out that Facebook was working on a question & answer service, the immediate reaction was that it would a “Quora killer.” That’s an obvious and sexy statement to make since Quora was built by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo and engineer/manager Charlie Cheever. And it’s even more sexy since Benchmark invested in the service at a $86 million valuation (and it’s not out of… → Read More
Two months ago, Google acquired promising social search startup Aardvark for around $50 million. The service allows you to ask questions and get responses almost immediately from other users who are knowledgeable about the topic at hand. Usually it takes Google many months (or longer) before it starts putting its acquisitions to work, but we’ve already come across what may be Google’s first use of… → Read More
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… → Read More
Google has acquired social search service Aardvark, says a source that has been briefed on the deal, for around $50 million. We first reported on the discussions between the two companies in December. Those discussions have now turned into a signed deal, says our source, and will be announced today or tomorrow.
Aardvark, founded by ex-Googlers, has raised around $6 million in venture capital to… → Read More
In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin published a paper[PDF] titled Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine, in which they outlined the core technology behind Google and the theory behind PageRank. Now, twelve years after that paper was published, the team behind social search engine Aardvark has drafted its own research paper that looks at the social side of search. Dubbed Anatomy of… → Read More
People are continually looking for new pieces of information. We go to school, read articles on a variety of subjects, have free websites such as Wikipedia, and use search answer engines such as Aardvark and Quora for the sole purpose of quenching our never-ending thirst for knowledge. But how do you find and access wanted information which people are unwilling to divulge, at least for free… → Read More
Sometimes it takes a while for a site to find its legs. Hunch, which launched last March to much fanfare, is only now in the past few months capturing the attention of consumers. As the comScore chart above shows, Hunch recently hit a growth spurt, jumping from an estimated 130,000 unique U.S. visitors in August, 2009 to 371,000 in November, 2009. While the overall size of the audience is… → Read More
Social search service Aardvark is considering accepting a $30+ million offer by Google, say multiple sources close to the companies (one source says it’s $40 million). The company, which was founded by ex-Googlers, has raised around $6 million in venture capital to date.
The company is also talking with other potential buyers, say our sources. And even if no one else comes to the table, they have… → Read More
It’s not yet clear what Chomp exactly is, but we do know that it’s a rather hot property right now. It took the still stealth start up just 10 days to raise a nice seed round from Ron Conway and a few other big name angel investors, we hear.
So what do we know? Well, the company is definitely in the mobile space. In fact, it’s a “BIG mobile play,” founder Ben Keighran tells us. Keighran, who in… → Read More
This is, apparently, not a fake exchange. A young journalist comes to Aardvark user Ryan Asava for help. Things go downhill from there. If you never quite understood the service, you’ll get it now. Our previous coverage of the company is here. Thanks Marshall.
Click below for the very funny conversation. → Read More
When you want an answer to a question, you want it now, which is why the social Q&A service Aardvark first launched as an IM client, then via Facebook, then Twitter. Only today is it opening up its Website as a general social search engine. And it’s just a much better interface than the command-line-reminiscent prompts in the IM interface.
You still have to sign in or sign up for the… → Read More
Over the past several months, the social search service Aardvark has gained a lot of fans. But what’s somewhat peculiar is that most of those users interact with the site via email or IM, rather than some slick-looking web app. And in fact, the service’s new iPhone app, launching today in the App Store, is easily the best-looking way to use Aardvark yet.
And it also looks to be the best way to… → Read More
Yesterday we sat down with two of Aardvark’s founders, Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, to get an update on the company and learn about today’s integration of Aardvark into Twitter.
Aardvark is a question an answer service with a twist. Instead of services like Yahoo Answers where the anonymous masses try to answer your questions (resulting in mostly spam), Aardvark sends questions to your social… → Read More
One of the most active sub-genres of search right now in terms of startup and new product activity is question and answer sites. Some searches are subjective and best answered by another human being. The success of Yahoo Answers proved this and spurred a raft of competitors to try their own hand at making Q&A better. These include Answerbag, Wiki Answers, Mahalo Answers, Aardvark, and … → Read More
Aardvark, the secretive, invite-only social search service founded by ex-Googlers that we first mentioned late last year, is preparing to become a little less secretive (the company has changed its name from Mechanical Zoo to Aardvark). They’ll start giving users virtually unlimited invitations starting next week – until now invites have been limited to one or so per month per user.
Aardvark is a… → Read More
Two startups, ChaCha and Mechanical Zoo, are taking different approaches to tap human intelligence, and human labor, and get you quick answers to your questions.
Despite attempts to evolve search into something more human friendly, there’s still a big hole there. As useful as Google is, it doesn’t answer questions very well, and it isn’t good at making highly subjective recommendations (where… → Read More
It’s a wonder to me how San Francisco based Mechanical Zoo, a startup founded by Max Ventilla (Google corp dev), Nathan Stoll (Google News) and Damon Horowitz (Perspecta), has managed to keep its social search product called Aardvark mostly out of the press these last few months. Even as it spreads virally via friend invitations in the private beta.
But that’s all going to end soon. The fifteen… → Read More
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