Aardvark

Ask a question over instant messenger and a friend of a friend who actually knew the answer wrote back within minutes, until Google bought it and put it on the spring-cleaning list

Acquired & killed
19902026

Aardvark was a social search service from San Francisco, built by The Mechanical Zoo from 2007 and opened to the public in March 2009. You asked a question through instant messenger, email or the site, and Aardvark found someone in your extended network who knew the topic and was online, then relayed the answer back, usually within a few minutes. Google bought it on 11 February 2010 for about $50 million and closed it in September 2011.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2008
  2. January 2008 other
    Prototype in use

    Angel funding of $750,000 in convertible notes.

  3. October 2008 Funding
    Series A of $6 million

    Led by August Capital.

  4. 2009
  5. March 2009 Launch
    Aardvark opens to the public

    Invitation only at first.

  6. 2010
  7. 11 February 2010 Acquisition
    Google buys Aardvark

    About $50 million.

  8. 2011
  9. 20 July 2011 other
    Google Labs closed

    Aardvark loses its home.

  10. 2 September 2011 Shutdown announced
    Listed in the fall spring-clean
  11. September 2011 Shutdown
    Aardvark goes offline

The site through time

Read the old front page here, in one piece, from our own capture: vark.com, 1 June 2009 →

Browse vark.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2009 2010 2011 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

The Mechanical Zoo 2007–2010 Founded Max Ventilla, Nathan Stoll, Damon Horowitz and Rob Spiro, San Francisco
Google 2010–2011 Acquisition Run inside Google Labs, then shut down

Key figures [edit]

MetricValueAs ofConfidence
Registered accounts ▲ 90,000 October 2009 Reported Figure from the founders' 2010 paper on the system

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Google bought Aardvark on 11 February 2010 for about $50 million and left it running inside Google Labs. On 2 September 2011, in the second of Larry Page's product clean-outs, Google said Aardvark would be shut down and the team moved to other work. The service stopped in September 2011.

Our analysis: Aardvark was a clever routing engine, not a search engine. It took a question, worked out what it was about, and pushed it over IM or email to the people in the asker's wider network who had said they knew that topic and were online. The answers were good and fast, and the system was honest about needing people rather than pages. But it needed a lot of willing answerers to keep the latency low, it could not show ads against a chat, and it never reached scale on its own. Google bought it for the team and the idea, kept it alive for eighteen months, and then folded social answering into Google+ and killed the standalone product.

History [edit]

A search engine made of people

The Mechanical Zoo was started in 2007 by Max Ventilla and Nathan Stoll, both ex-Google, with Damon Horowitz and Rob Spiro. Their product, Aardvark, took the oldest way of finding things out, asking someone who knows, and made it fast. You added Aardvark as a buddy on Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo Messenger or Windows Live Messenger, or you emailed it, and typed a question the way you would ask a friend: a good cheap sushi place near Union Square, how to get a red wine stain out of a wool rug. Aardvark read the question, guessed the topics, and looked through your friends and friends of friends for people who had listed those topics and were online right now. It asked one or two of them, and when one answered, the reply came back to you with the answerer's name and how you were connected.

A prototype ran in 2008, the service opened in March 2009 on an invitation basis, and the company raised a $6 million Series A from August Capital. A 2010 paper by the founders described a system with about 90,000 users in late 2009, most questions answered within minutes, and roughly 70 percent of them answered at all, which for a system that depended on strangers being kind was remarkable.

Google, then the list

On 11 February 2010 Google bought the company for a price reported at $50 million. Aardvark moved into Google Labs and kept running, with the team meant to bring social answering into Google's own products. Labs was closed in July 2011 after Larry Page took over as chief executive and started cutting projects, and on 2 September 2011 Google's "fall spring-clean" post listed Aardvark among ten products being shut down. The service went offline that month. Google+ had launched two months earlier and was where the social effort now lived.

The domain today

vark.com is no longer Google's. The Aardvark question archive was not preserved.

Similar projects

DMOZ The web, catalogued by hand 1998–2017 AltaVista Search, before Google 1995–2013 Infoseek One of the first big web search engines, Netscape's default for a year, bought by Disney and buried inside Go.com 1995–2001 Technorati The search engine that ranked the blogosphere, whose Authority score every blogger checked daily, quietly switched off in 2014 when the conversation moved to Twitter 2002–2014 Vine Six seconds, looped forever 2013–2017 Wunderlist The to-do app Microsoft bought to bury 2010–2020

Sources [edit]

  1. Google acquires Aardvark for $50 million TechCrunch 11 February 2010 [archived]
  2. A fall spring-clean Google official blog 2 September 2011 [archived]
  3. Aardvark (search engine) Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]
  4. vark.com in the Wayback Machine Internet Archive 1 February 2010

Last verified: 22 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).