Is Q&A The Future of Search? Google Acquires Aardvark
February 14, 2010 by Pablo Palatnik
WebProNews reports that Google has acquired Aardvark, a Q&A website for $50 million dollars. Question and answer sites have been a real success on the web, from the first AskJeeves engine to what I believe is the current largest one, Yahoo! Answers.
These question and answers sites provide much value to searchers as well as many companies who use these websites to promote their products or services, but for the most part they aren’t spammed out. Aardvark has sent out this email to users today:
“Dear friends,
Aardvark has just been acquired by Google!
Aardvark will remain fully operational and completely free, providing quick, helpful answers to all of your questions. For more information about how the acquisition affects Aardvark users, check out the FAQ that we’ve put together….”
“We want social search to reach hundreds of millions people around the world, and joining with Google lets us reach that scale — we’re also excited to work with the team at Google: our company has a culture that was inspired by Google in many ways, and we have a lot of respect for the folks who work there,” the company says in a blog post.
