Google Poaches Social Search Service Aardvark

Given the focus on local and mobile, Google has made a smart buy here. Pair Vark’s technology with its new social network Buzz and its mobile applications, and Google has leading-edge technology in search that uses humans as much as algorithms to find answers to questions.

In fact, Ask.com — which is attempting to revitalize its long, lost semi-automated question answering service via its Ask Answers service — heralded the purchase as a validation of its “mission of developing a full Q&A site and focusing on answers, with a community element.”

Aardvark was founded in late 2007 by several ex-Googlers, including Max Ventilla and Nathan Stoll (formerly Google News engineer), along with programmer Damon Horowitz. The site opened to the public in 2009, after raising about $6 million in venture funding in 2008.

Think of Vark as Yahoo Answers with profiling algorithms.

Users who sign up give Vark access to one of their social networks — Facebook, LinkedIn or the e-mails in their contact list. Users then say what things they are confident answering questions about (e.g. chess, cooking, country music). Vark then routes future questions — such as what’s the best country band out of the south from the 1970s or where’s a good sushi restaurant near Santa Monica — to the right person. A series of algorithms keeps tuning the targeting by watching if a user’s answers are quick and useful, deciding whether their friends are also experts, and checking if a user is online or has been asked to answer too many questions recently.