Mountain View, California — The coolest search engine that never reached the masses got snapped up by Google Thursday for a reported $50 million. With its first acquisition of 2010, Google is making it know that it is serious about social networking. The company intends to get more social and compete with fast-moving rivals such as Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., on Thursday confirmed that it has acquired social search start-up Aardvark, a company founded by ex-Google employees.
Aardvark, a company that empowers you to use IM, Twitter and e-mail to ask full-text questions and then get answers from people in or close to your social network, confirmed it inked a deal with Google.
Aardark co-founder and CTO Damon Horowitz confirmed to the Guardian that “we have signed an agreement with Google,” — but did not comment on the report from Silicon Valley news blog Techcrunch, which first revealed the story, that put the value of the acquisition at $50m.
The San Francisco-based Aardvark, which was established in 2007, in part by two former Googlers, Max Ventilla, who was responsible for Google’s marketing and monetization initiatives around Adsense and Web applications, and Nathan Stroll, who headed Google News — delivers what it calls the chance to “tap the knowledge of people in your network” by matching a user’s questions with friends and contacts who might be able to provide an expert answer.
Rather than a traditional search engine based on pre-indexed Web pages, Aardvark aggregates the contacts in a person’s network to provide answers to questions via the Web at Vark.com, instant messaging, email or Twitter.
Users first connect their account to other social networking sites, such as Facebook. When they enter a search term into the Aardvark search engine — such as “what is the best pizza in Brighton” — the service then sends a message to the searcher’s friends or friends of friends, via email, instant messenger or other means, but only to those that are online at the time and that would be likely to have an answer to the question.
In a recent blog post, Aardvark said it only has a user base of around 90,000 in October 2009 and is keen on growth to make itself more powerful — it has drawn rave reviews from many quarters for providing a more elegant, personalized solution to searching for information.
Aardvark said 75 percent of the users who requested Aardvark a question also answered a question for someone else, about 87.7 percent of the questions sent to Aardvark received answers from a friend or a friend of a friend.
The company touts a technical team of “over 20 people, including engineers from each of Silicon Valley’s major technology companies” and its website lists several job vacancies.
By acquiring Aardvark, Google is intensifying its already substantial commitment to social networking — an interest evident in the launch of Google Buzz earlier this week — and is expanding beyond algorithmic problem solving toward services with more of a human component.
Given the focus on local and mobile, Google has made a smart buy here. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said in a conference call with analysts last month that the Mountain View, California, company planned to acquire about one company a month this year.