14 DAY TRIAL // Google's social web prowess seems to be growing these days. After just launching its new social network/aggregator, Friendfeed-inspired Google Buzz, the company has confirmed it acquired social search and Q&A service Aardvark for a rumored but unconfirmed $50 million. As a side note, have you noticed how web services are getting harder and harder to label?
The acquisition was first reported by TechCrunch, who picked up on a rumor and which also set the price tag. It's not the first time there is talk about Google acquiring the company. Both companies have now confirmed the deal but haven't disclosed any financial or other kind of details for the moment. "We have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Aardvark, but we don't have any additional details to share right now," Google said in a statement. Aardvarak has raised $6 million in venture capital to date making the rumored $50 million a decent exit for investors. Aardvark is a search service at heart, but rather than relying on algorithms to help you find how tall the Eiffel Tower is, it relies on your friends and your friends' friends to help you find the best place in town to eat or what camera would better suit your need and wallet. You can ask a question on Aardvark, either using the site or IM or a number of other methods and get your answer in a manner of minutes from people you know and trust.
It taps into your social graph from various social sites and also employs quite a clever algorithm to determine who would be more qualified to answer the question. The service has about 100,000 users so far, nothing spectacular but a good start, and has very high, if not totally unsurprising, success rate, almost 90 percent of the questions get an answer. 70 percent of the answers were labeled as good, 14 percent as OK and a little over 15 percent as bad.
It's a pretty good addition to Google's powerful search products and it should be interesting to see how Aardvark does with Google's might behind it. There is also the question of whether Google pushes Aadrvark as a stand-alone product and maybe integrate it with some other Google products or gets the team to create something completely new within the company, both paths having been taken by Google before.