Google buys social search company Aardvark

Headquarter within the Silicon Valley, CA,  Google Inc. has grown to become the worlds leading search engine.  One of the soul reasons for Google's success is it's simplicity within its operations.  Recently Google acquired Aardvark, a social search company.  Aardvark is simply a "Company that fields questions and routes them for answers to the most qualified respondents within the user's social networking circle."  The way the system works, requires the user to set up a list of contacts upon signing up.  These contacts are taken directly from their contacts on Facebook, Gmail and any other manual entry to compose their list.  Options for friends of friends, Facebook groups  are also an option.  What makes Aardvark unique and essential for google is that instead of finding web pages through google, Aardvark allows people to find people instead.  Aardvark does not use pre-indexed web pages, therefore questions asked are met with unique and customized responses by friends at real time.  

Founded as recent as 2007, Aardvark is considered "the first social search engine."  This company is most beneficial for google in many ways.  Apart from Google's dominance in creating the worlds leading search engine by finding targeted search results by scanning the world wide web for the most compatible results.  Google's competitors include Yahoo, MSN and AOL to name a few.  Upon all of these competitors, Yahoo has took the search engines to a new level by introducing Yahoo Answers.  Yahoo answers in essence, is Google's bootleg version of Aardvark, allowing users to ask a question to await a response from a person rather than a website.  Now with the acquisition of Aardvark, Google can now compete against Yahoo Answers in social search engines and once again remain on top.

The implementation of Aardvark could prove to be very prosperous for the veteran company Google, but history is not on Google's side.  In the past, company's have tried implementing and creating the same social search engine in which Aardvark was designed to do.  In doing so, many have failed due to response rates and participation.  As of October 2009, only 55.9% of Aardvark's 90,361 users have participated and contributed/created content on the site.  This low percentage of active users raises much concern in predicting the success of Aardvark.  Raising much concerns, there is also a great deal of hope within responses from those who contribute in adding content.  Of all of the questions asked on Aardvark, 87.7% were answered with an average response time of 6minutes and 27seconds.

I believe that the acquisition of Aardvark is a step in the right direction for Google.  Being a leading search engine, Aardvark will help google to expand into a social search engine reaching different target markets.  The success of Aardvark will depend solely on the participation rate of its users, and therefore it is hard to predict it's success.  Since Aardvark has been implemented and tested prior to being bought by Google, it is safe to say the system works but is not perfect.  With Google's outstanding reputation and success of its existing search engine, their is no doubt in my mind that Google's will be one of the biggest contributes to Aardvark's success.

By, Joseph Tazza

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100211-715034.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9155879/Google_buys_social_search_company_Aardvark

http://it.tmcnet.com/topics/it/articles/75249-google-said-be-ready-close-acquisition-aardvark-50.htm