Aardvark

Aardvark, initially named Mechanical Zoo, was established in 2007 by a team of four co-founders: Max Ventilla, Nathan Stoll, Damon Horowitz, and Rob Spiro. Many on the founding team, including Ventilla and Stoll, were former Google employees who brought extensive experience from major tech companies to their new venture. The founders' backgrounds were diverse; Ventilla earned a BS and an MBA from Yale, Stoll graduated from Stanford with degrees in Computer Science and Political Science, and Horowitz uniquely combined a tech career with deep academic pursuits in philosophy, holding an MS in Artificial Intelligence from MIT and a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford. This blend of technical and humanistic expertise shaped the company's core concept.

The business operated in the social search market, pioneering a model often referred to as a "knowledge market." It was designed to answer subjective questions that traditional algorithmic search engines struggled with. The service's unique selling point was its human-centric approach; instead of crawling web pages, it routed questions to people within a user's extended social network who were likely to have relevant knowledge or experience. This created a system for tapping into the collective intelligence of one's connections for recommendations, technical help, and other nuanced queries. Users could interact with Aardvark through familiar channels like instant messenger, email, or its website, submitting questions in plain English without needing to install any software.

The company's revenue model was not publicly detailed before its acquisition, as its primary focus was on user growth and service refinement. Aardvark secured initial funding in 2008 and later raised $6 million in a Series A round led by August Capital. By October 2009, the platform had attracted over 90,000 users. This traction and its novel approach to search culminated in its acquisition by Google in February 2010 for approximately $50 million. Following the acquisition, the Aardvark team and service were integrated into Google. However, in September 2011, Google announced it was discontinuing several products, including Aardvark, bringing an end to the social search experiment.

Keywords: Aardvark, social search, knowledge market, question-answering engine, human-powered search, Max Ventilla, Damon Horowitz, Nathan Stoll, Rob Spiro, Google acquisition, Mechanical Zoo, real-time answers, expert network, peer-to-peer knowledge, social Q&A, IM-based search, email-based search, collaborative search, user-generated answers, social network search