PalatnikFactor.com » Acquisitions

Is Q&A The Future of Search? Google Acquires Aardvark

Pablo Palatnik — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 06:19:52 +0000

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.

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Google To Purchase Yelp for $500 Million

Pablo Palatnik — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:22:15 +0000

Reported by TechCrunch, there is a rumor floating around that Google is planning to purchase social LOCAL site YELP for a reported $500, morless. It may be a sign of some sort of economic recovery, as acquisitions in 2009 have been too few and far between in comparison to 07-08′ where a lot of online acquisitions were made. The last acquisition we saw was just this week with the sell of social site Friendster.com.

What does this tell us? It points us in a direction that Google wants to go to and focus a bit more on the search side which is LOCAL SEARCH. Around the industry, many think this is a HUGE step for Google to take towards this purchase as we haven’t seen a move by Google like this in a while.

“Google is building out their own directory of local businesses with its Place Pages, which can be accessed via Google Maps and local search. They are encouraging local businesses to put Google-branded stickers in store windows and recently added their own ratings summaries to business profiles. Yelp, of course, already has all of this data, along with a growing and active audience of consumers who are used to finding (and rating) businesses on Yelp.”

Read the Whole Story @ TechCrunch —–>
Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More
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Evaluating Friendster Sale at 26.4 Million

Pablo Palatnik — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:41:07 +0000

Michael Arrington reports on the sale of Friendster on TechCrunch valued at $26.4 million. Friendster was one of the first and largest online social networking sites like Facebook but quickly came to a steep decline with the launch of Myspace. Friendster, even though the buyout was at a very low price for what it once COULD HAVE been, is maybe the right decision as with the explosive growth of Facebook, you need to take the company in another direction.

Arrington reports:

The total purchase price paid was $39.5 million. But lots of stuff was deducted, totalling $13 million and change:

* $3.7 million in secured debt
* $2.5 million in cash in Friendster’s bank account
* $2.1 million paid to Friendster CEO Richard Kimber
* $1.4 million to other Frienster executives
* $3.4 million to Morgan Stanley and other third parties (lawyers, escrow agents, etc.)

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The decline in traffic has been drastic compared to the other large social networks and with less traffic, comes a lot less revenue stream.

Read the whole story @ TechCrunch.com ——–> Friendster Valued At Just $26.4 Million In Sale

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