What Aardvark Can Do for Google

The timing of Google's purchase of Aardvark and release of Google buzz can't be coincidental. But what can Aardvark do for Google? An awful lot, as it turns out.

Aardvark is a question-and-answer service more than a search engine. You ask a question via email or instant message, and it looks through your list of friends as well as your friends' friends before sending your question to those who would be able to answer it best. So if you ask "What's the best coffeeshop in San Francisco's Mission District?" it'll only send the question to those who live or have lived in San Francisco. Your answers won't be a list of external links, like a typical search engine, but a genuine human reply, just like in those horrible, horrible days before the Internet when people had to (shudder) relate to one another. And if you're doubting the chance of actually receiving a response, you'll be surprised: It's remarkably efficient, returning an answer 90% of the time, and 60% of the time within 10 minutes. Even better, users rank about 70% of answers as "good," and only 15% as "bad." So why does Google want Aardvark? Could be the valuable search data Aardvark's collected--who's searching for what, what kind of answers are most satisfying for the user, that kind of thing--as well as the personnel involved in its creation. Also, remember, Google owned Foursquare's predecessor, Dodgeball, but allowed it to go fallow, only to have Foursquare explode in popularity a few years later. Google can't let that happen again with a similar service, especially now, with the launch of Buzz.