Earlier this morning, we heard rumors that Google was in the process of acquiring Q&A service Aardvark for around $50 million. Aardvark, which was founded by ex-Google employees, was one of our favorite Web services of 2010, but the company still remains relatively small. Aardvark had around 100,000 users in October 2009. Aardvark co-founder Max Ventilla just confirmed with us that the company has indeed signed a deal with Google, though he didn’t disclose any details.
Why would Google be interested in this company? For one, Aardvark’s team has created a very smart algorithm that can route questions to just the right people. On average, almost 90% of all the questions on Aardvark got answered in October 2009, and the quality of these answers was generally very high.
Maybe Google is also interested in hiring back some of the engineers that left Google for Aardvark. Among them are Ventilla, who used to focus on “strategy for Google’s marketing and monetization initiatives around Adsense and web applications,” co-founder Nathan Still, who was the head of Google News for three years, Javascript specialist Fritz Scheider, and Bill MacCartney, who designed a Q&A system for Google Research before he joined Aardvark.
This is not the first time that we’ve heard rumors of an Aardvark acquisition, but in the past the deal either fell through or was nothing more than a rumor. Now, however, we have confirmation that Aardvark has indeed signed with Google. We don’t expect the companies to disclose the exact price of the acquisition, but we expect to see official statements from both of them soon.
