Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
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Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
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Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
#2What is the business case for Google in acquiring Aardvark?
Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
#3What is the business case for Google in acquiring Aardvark?
Facebook is about getting information from your social circle, while Google search is about getting information from the internet at large. It seems they are looking at various ways to bridge that gap.
Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
#4I'm interested to see how this develops. I'd hate for google to drop the ball (a la dodgeball, omnisio, etc.). Vark is such a unique, useful service.
Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
#5I'm interested to see how this develops. I'd hate for google to drop the ball (a la dodgeball, omnisio, etc.). Vark is such a unique, useful service.
I'd be curious to know how you use the service. Most of the questions I see asked on it seem pretty poor and uninformative.
Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
#6What is the business case for Google in acquiring Aardvark?
Aardvark will integrate extremely naturally into Google Buzz.
Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
#7This price seems really high considering the amount of traction aardvark had (not much). $50M is a pricey talent acquisition
Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
#8Wow! I've been an avid 'Varker for sometime now and this is very surprising!
I think this is probably more of a talent acquisition than anything:
Just the _highlights_ from http://vark.com/team
* Max Ventilla - former Googler; marketing and monetization
* Nathan Stoll - former Googler; headed Google News for three years
* Fritz Schneider - former Googler; founded and led Google's Firefox and Safe Browsing teams
* Winton Davies - founding member of Yahoo Research Labs and a Principal Research Engineer at Overture, GoTo, and Cadabra.
* Bill MacCartney - former Googler; designed an automated question answering system at Google Research
* Sameer Paranjpye - founded and headed Yahoo’s Grid Computing team, responsible for the Apache Hadoop project
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Aardvark has also come out with some great research projects in the past few weeks/months. [http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf]
"Back in October, we wrote a research paper entitled 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine' and submitted it to WWW 2010. We found out last week that it has been accepted, so we wanted to share a preview with you today!
Our paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine', in which =>Sergey Brin and Larry Page<= originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference."
Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
#9What is the business case for Google in acquiring Aardvark?
One thing they probably really like is the natural language parsing. It's surprisingly good (though by no means perfect) at automatically tagging your question.
For example, looking through my old questions, I think it automatically tagged "what's a good place to get a cheap SSL certificate? I don't think I need wildcard subdomains" as "SSL".
In a perfect world, you ask Google a question just like you'd ask a person a question, and they answer it with the info you want, so they might be interested in the technology and people that make this intelligent tagging work as a step in that direction.
Re: Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
#10This price seems really high considering the amount of traction aardvark had (not much). $50M is a pricey talent acquisition
It may not be too high if you look at the VC money they had raised. $6M had been invested so if that was a 50% stake then you are looking at a 4x return for the VC. Isn't that about right?