
Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million - ashishk
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/11/google-acquires-aardvark-for-50-million/
======
bgraves
Wow! I've been an avid 'Varker for sometime now and this is very surprising!

I think this is probably more of a talent acquisition than anything:

Just the _highlights_ from <http://vark.com/team>

* Max Ventilla - former Googler; marketing and monetization

* Nathan Stoll - former Googler; headed Google News for three years

* Fritz Schneider - former Googler; founded and led Google's Firefox and Safe Browsing teams

* Winton Davies - founding member of Yahoo Research Labs and a Principal Research Engineer at Overture, GoTo, and Cadabra.

* Bill MacCartney - former Googler; designed an automated question answering system at Google Research

* Sameer Paranjpye - founded and headed Yahoo’s Grid Computing team, responsible for the Apache Hadoop project

\--

Aardvark has also come out with some great research projects in the past few
weeks/months. [<http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf>]

"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!

Our paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale
Hypertextual Web Search Engine', in which =>Sergey Brin and Larry Page<=
originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was
published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference."

~~~
seiji
There was a time I believed all corporate activities were based only on merit.
Anything not completely merit derived would be illegal. That's what we're made
to believe with all kinds of anti-descriminition laws (you can't ask age,
about kids, etc during interviews for example).

It turns out, everything is friend based. Know rich people? They'll help you
get rich too. Have a project you don't want to do inside of Google? Just quit,
make it anyway, then they'll re-hire you with a $5M per head bonus.

I'd find it delightful if I were in such a position, but I'm not. Not only am
I not, but the more technical side of me doesn't want to play social games to
become ingratiated to the decision makers. Deep down, I still believe the
world is merit based -- and that's one reason why I'm still a nobody doing
nothing going nowhere.

I'd be better off not reading HN most days.

~~~
paul
You just want to world to recognize you as "having merit" and give you money?
You want to be successful, but are unwilling to make any sort of effort?

Create something remarkable and people with money will find you.

~~~
axod
Surely that assumes people with money are good at spotting 'worth'...

~~~
paul
That problem exists regardless. Who can truly judge "merit"? However,
investing has a built-in selective pressure. The people who are good at
spotting things that will make money get more money -- the ones that aren't
good at it lose money.

------
geuis
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

~~~
beermann
ha, I was one of the presenters there, for Sharendipity. You're right that
Aardvark didn't talk much about the tech, considering it was for Developer
Fridays. They did focus a lot on expanding the ways you could use the social
graph in FB though. I thought it was nice to see that they've been acquired,
although I thought the price tag was a bit surprising.

------
epi0Bauqu
Where do they get this valuation from? That's greater than $500/user, and
their growth curve doesn't look exponential by any means:
<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/vark.com/?metric=uv>. (Yes, I know compete
sucks, but often the shape is correct.)

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?

~~~
agotterer
A lot of their service runs over IM and other non trackable tools. But it does
seem like a high valuation. I assume its a talent + technology acquisition and
not a play for eyeballs?

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

~~~
carson
It may not be too high if you look at the VC money they had raised. $6M had
been invested so if that was a 50% stake then you are looking at a 4x return
for the VC. Isn't that about right?

~~~
jdrock
The buyer doesn't do his valuation based on what's put into the company.

~~~
webwright
Not true (or at least not ALWAYS true). Do you think corpdev guys are immune
to anchoring? Here's a study:

"Take a minute and answer this two-part question:

1\. Is the percentage of African nations in the United Nations higher or lower
than 65? 2\. What is the percentage of African nations in the United Nations?

This was one of the queries that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman posed in
their 1974 paper in Science called “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and
Biases.” It turns out that the answer you provide to the second question is
heavily swayed by that first question. The average estimate for question two
was above 45 percent. When question one was lowered from 65 percent to 10
percent, the average estimation of question two was dropped to 25 percent. "

Source: [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/files/26237737-fixed-to-
flexibl...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/files/26237737-fixed-to-flexible-the-
ebook.pdf)

In a financial negotiation, setting an anchor can be powerful. a VC investment
(and accompanying valuation) is an anchor.

------
sachinag
$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.

~~~
axod
For a small forum with not much traction, only something like 3000 questions
posted a day, it seems slightly insane to me...

Sometimes I guess acquisitions are just random, and likely more about the
people involved than anything else.

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

~~~
aaronblohowiak
I don't think this is an effort to acquire users.

~~~
davidmurphy
Good point -- Google's got a bunch of users, I hear. ;-)

------
heyrhett
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 _Aardvark_.

(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
_Aardvark_ \-- 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: __Aardvark __)
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.)

------
seldo
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.

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.

~~~
derwiki
The map part seems like an easily switchable component, and the bulk of Yelp
is the community and the reviews themselves. Also, I think other parts of Yelp
use Bing and Yahoo maps.

~~~
seldo
Sure, but my point is that Yelp's core tech of storing venue information,
ratings and reviews is not "hard" -- Google and Yahoo both have services that
do this. But it beats the pants off of them because its user interface and
social dynamics encourage better data.

~~~
derwiki
I'll definitely agree with that. Google seems to have a hard time creating a
community with their offerings.

------
aaronblohowiak
What is the business case for Google in acquiring Aardvark?

~~~
jackowayed
One thing they probably really like is the natural language parsing. It's
surprisingly good (though by no means perfect) at automatically tagging your
question.

For example, looking through my old questions, I think it automatically tagged
"what's a good place to get a cheap SSL certificate? I don't think I need
wildcard subdomains" as "SSL".

In a perfect world, you ask Google a question just like you'd ask a person a
question, and they answer it with the info you want, so they might be
interested in the technology and people that make this intelligent tagging
work as a step in that direction.

~~~
shafqat
Not to be snarky, but what is impressive about tagging your question with
"SSL" - the exact keyword is in the question. No semantic analysis or NLP
required - just simple keyword based entity extraction.

~~~
jackowayed
I know, it's not brilliant, but SSL wasn't in a particularly special place in
the sentence or anything that would make it easy for a computer to figure it
out. Compare that question to something like "I am using Rails. How do I
...?", where a computer would have a pretty easy time of figuring out that
Rails is important with some simple parsing logic.

~~~
bigbang
Not quite true. Using the standard TF-IDF would have definitely figured out
SSL.

------
mixmax
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.

~~~
stanleydrew
150% ROI to be exact, which is more than "a little more than 100%," but
certainly not the order of magnitude more the VCs were probably looking for.
Based on your assumptions though, is it fair to say the founders probably
exerted quite a bit of control over when to sell, and if so why do you think
they would do that? Desperate to return to Google? ;)

------
ashishk
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.

~~~
icco
I'd be curious to know how you use the service. Most of the questions I see
asked on it seem pretty poor and uninformative.

~~~
martian
If you ask an interesting, detailed question, you'll usually get something
unique in return.

An example of a question (and an awesome answer) I submitted:
<http://vark.com/t/cad4a0>

~~~
frossie
You thought that was an awesome answer? IMHO the top Google result for the
search "Borges where to start" gives a better one.

Like many social networking features, I don't get this one. I sorta-know what
my friends know - I am more interested in stuff my friends _don't_ know.

~~~
jackowayed
It's not just limited to your friends. I have a fairly small network on vark
(~8 people I think), but I think only 1 time have I actually gotten a question
from one of my friends. It extends to friends of friends and even just random
people if it doesn't think your friends know or they choose not to answer.

I've also never actually gotten a question from a friend.

------
kevinpet
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.

