Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

Wow! I've been an avid 'Varker for sometime now and this is very surprising!<p>I think this is probably more of a talent acquisition than anything:<p>Just the _highlights_ from <a href="http://vark.com/team" rel="nofollow">http://vark.com/team</a><p>* Max Ventilla - former Googler; marketing and monetization<p>* Nathan Stoll - former Googler; headed Google News for three years<p>* Fritz Schneider - former Googler; founded and led Google's Firefox and Safe Browsing teams<p>* Winton Davies - founding member of Yahoo Research Labs and a Principal Research Engineer at Overture, GoTo, and Cadabra.<p>* Bill MacCartney - former Googler; designed an automated question answering system at Google Research<p>* Sameer Paranjpye - founded and headed Yahoo’s Grid Computing team, responsible for the Apache Hadoop project<p>--<p>Aardvark has also come out with some great research projects in the past few weeks/months. [<a href="http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf</a>]<p>"Back in October, we wrote a research paper entitled 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine' and submitted it to WWW 2010. We found out last week that it has been accepted, so we wanted to share a preview with you today!<p>Our paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine', in which =&#62;Sergey Brin and Larry Page&#60;= originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference."

Saw these guys at Facebook HQ a couple months ago. Seemed like during their entire presentation they were trying to pitch their company to someone with purchasing power at FB

Where do they get this valuation from? That's greater than $500/user, and their growth curve doesn't look exponential by any means: <a href="http://siteanalytics.compete.com/vark.com/?metric=uv" rel="nofollow">http://siteanalytics.compete.com/vark.com/?metric=uv</a>. (Yes, I know compete sucks, but often the shape is correct.)<p>Talent doesn't make sense at that price, more like a few million. The tech can't be that out of the ordinary for Google given they just launched Buzz and Wave. So what was it that deserved that price? Bidding war?

This price seems really high considering the amount of traction aardvark had (not much). $50M is a pricey talent acquisition

$50 million is the same price as GrandCentral, which became Google Voice. It's all but impossible to tell how important strategically any one acquisition is to Google until they execute on it. This feels more important than Jaiku/Dodgeball, but really, only time will tell if $50 million was a bargain or a giveaway.

That's 1000 dollars per user (that created content). Isn't that too much? Is this value important?

me: Why did google pay so much money for Aardvark, the company made by the mechanical zoo? aardvark: Got it. I'm sending your question to someone who knows about <i>Aardvark</i>.<p>(Type 'tag' to fix that label, 'more' for options, or 'cancel'.) Sent at 2:51 PM on Thursday aardvark: (Update: No response yet from people who know about <i>Aardvark</i> -- but I'm still looking. Type 'tag:' followed by a different category to try other people.) Sent at 3:01 PM on Thursday aardvark: (An answer just arrived... From Derek P./28/M/Brookville,PA, Re: <i></i>Aardvark<i></i>) That's what I'm trying to find out. I tend to hate services like this, that are for people too dumb to Google. ... WAIT A MINUTE?! (To reply, type 'Derek:' followed by a message, or type 'flag' if this answer is inappropriate. Type 'more' for options.)

While there is definitely a bunch of talent on the team, I'd say this is definitely a technology acquisition, but specifically a UI acquisition -- Google could build the back-end to vark tomorrow, but the user interaction is something they could never have come up with.<p>This is also why they should acquire Yelp -- it's not about the tech (in fact, Yelp is built on Google maps). It's about the interface.

What is the business case for Google in acquiring Aardvark?

Assuming VC's got 30% of the company that's a payout of $15 million from an investment of $6 million giving a little more than 100% a return on investment. These numbers are educated guesses of course, but it doesn't seem like the VC's got a lot out of this. Normally it's expected that the homeruns give a 1000% return on investment.

I'm interested to see how this develops. I'd hate for google to drop the ball (a la dodgeball, omnisio, etc.). Vark is such a unique, useful service.

From Google's point of view, it's worth it. If they think they could develop this in-house for $5 million, and maybe it'd be great, maybe it'd be okay, and maybe it would suck. Spending $50 million to let them have the pick of proven technology that they can already see working before spending the money removes the risk.