Google, in an endeavor of widening its social-networking commitment, confirmed on Thursday that It
had acquired Aardvark.Aardvark (was known as Mechanical zoo formerly), founded by ex-Google employees in July 2007, is a social search service company. Though Google has not confirmed any price for this agreement, but a report on Techcrunch confirmed the price to be 50 million dollars. It launched into private beta in 2008.
Aardvark has raised around 6 million dollars in venture capital till date. It provides a match making service for questions and answers. The users submit queries in aardvark and then it connects the searcher to friends, their friends and so on, whoever likely to have the best answer.
As per records, by October 2009, Aardvark had more than 90000 users, from whom around 60% had asked or answered questions, and thus had created content. And it is interesting to note that, the number of mobile users is much more than the number of desktop users.
As Aardvark claims, almost 98% of the questions asked in Aardvark are unique as compared to 65% on traditional search engines. These differences comes due to the use of natural languages used in Aardvark queries where people can use words like “a”, “if”, “the” etc whereas the traditional search engines avoid these words. And the people can write a detailed query which another human reads and understands better than an algorithm decoding few words of search-subject.
So Google is now trying to expand its reach beyond the algorithmic problem solving toward service with more of a human component.
Google acquired Zingku and Jaiku social networking last in September and October 2007.
