Google Spends $50M on Aardvark

It was recently announced that Google purchased Aardvark for around $50 million dollars. The first question you may have is what is Aardvark?

“Aardvark (formerly Mechanical Zoo) is a social search engine, founded by a group of former Google employees. Aardvark that lets users ask questions that are distributed to the social graph for a quick and high quality answers.

Aardvark is a way to get quick, quality answers to questions from your extended social network. You can ask questions via an instant message buddy or email. The questions are then farmed out to your contacts (and their contacts) based on what they say they have knowledge of. If you ask taste related questions about music, books, movies, restaurants, etc., they’ll ask people who tend to show similar tastes as you in their profile.”

Some additional details posted by Techcrunch about Aardvark says the following:

-87.7% of questions submitted were answered, and nearly 60% of them were answered within 10 minutes.  The median answering time was 6 minutes and 37 seconds, with the average question receiving two answers.

-As of October 2009, Aardvark had 90,361 users, of whom 55.9% had created content (asked or answered a question). The site’s average query volume was 3,167.2 questions per day, with the median active user asking 3.1 questions per month. Interestingly, mobile users are more active than desktop users.

-98.1% of questions asked on Aardvark were unique, compared with between 57 and 63% on traditional search engines.

Another interesting fact about Aardvark is that beyond asking you about the topics you’re most familiar with, Aardvark will actually look at your past blog posts, existing online profiles, and tweets to identify what topics you know about. Hopefully the above information has provided you enough context to understand what this purchase means for Google. You can ask quesions via gchat, AIM, via the web or with a mobile phone app. You will then get responses from Aardvark via gchat, AIM as well as on the web. One cool feature is that if given permission, Aardvark will send you other user’s questions (based on the subjects you are considered an expert in) via IM to assist them in getting answers.

What does this purchase mean?

1) The ability to combine the newly released Google Buzz and Aardvark will create a very interactive, real time environment from within Google Buzz. It will most certainly become the one stop shop for people to do their social research and collaboration projects. Aardvark’s technology could make the service more useful by connecting friends of friends to produce useful information.

2) Add in the wild card factor of Google Wave and the picture could become even clearer. The beauty of Google Wave is real time collaboration on “blank slates”. The integration of Aardvark into Google Wave would be very interesting to see and could also offer some legitimacy to Google Wave which has failed to gain much mainstream appeal.

3) This is also a step to further add to the dominance of Google Search results. Think additional answers that people are looking for + a high number of users engaging every day = yet another opportunity for Google to earn advertising revenue.

4) Aardvark is widely considered to be better than their #1 competitor, Yahoo Answers, and even better than a past Google project known as Google Answers. Google simply purchased this service to plug the gap in their knowledge base and increase their value.

5) This is the next major step in Google’s quest to become the one stop shop for everything on the internet. Of course, they have a ways to go, but this is an interesting play which will strengthen Google by adding value to its existing services (Buzz, Wave) and position themselves for their next purchase.

What do you think this latest purchase by Google means?