aardvark

Google closes 10 businesses to focus on bigger bets

Google chief executive Larry Page continued shedding marginal operations from the Web giant today, shuttering 10 different businesses, including everything from social search to desktop software to Web security.

In announcing the news, Google Senior Vice President Alan Eustace called it a "fall spring-cleaning." Since taking over as chief executive in January, Page has moved to streamline Google's operations, pulling back from niche businesses in order to focus on the biggest bets. Eustace wrote that the new cuts reflect that strategy.

"This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience," … Read more

Google Talk Guru turns IM into a search tool

Always looking for new ways to deliver its search results, Google has rolled out a new app that combines instant messaging with search.

Launched today as the latest experiment in the Google Labs playground, Google Talk Guru offers you a chat session through which you can ask certain questions and receive responses from an automated bot set up on the back end.

For now, the app can handle only certain types of questions from among a limited number of categories, such as weather, sports scores, math equations, definitions, and translations. But like other Google Labs apps, it's something to … Read more

Questioning Facebook's Q&A quest

Every so often a test Facebook feature pops up for some of the social network's 400 million users, and this week it was some sort of question-and-answer service. This generated more interest than a Facebook product prototype would have otherwise because a Q&A feature on Facebook would presumably compete with Quora, a new start-up founded by former Facebook employees--including CTO Adam D'Angelo, who left Facebook two years ago.

The "Facebook Questions" story was originally reported by AllFacebook's Nick O'Neill, who said a few readers had tipped him off to the presence of &… Read more

Google acquires social search engine Aardvark

Google has acquired social-search provider Aardvark, right on the heels of the company's Google Buzz announcement.

Google declined to share financial terms of the deal, but TechCrunch reported that Google paid $50 million for the start-up. "We have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Aardvark, but we don't have any additional details to share right now," a company representative said in a statement.

Aardvark's search engine scans the profiles of people you've designated as friends in an attempt to match their expertise or interests with a query, such as, "What's the best … Read more

Aardvark emerges: Social search that works

Nothing against Google or any other big search engine, but I think my friends are smarter than the rest of the world. When I want advice on a restaurant, a product I'm thinking of buying, or where to take my kid on a rainy Saturday, it's my circle of contacts I want that info from. That's social search, and I think it's got a big future. I've covered a few interesting products in that space, and today I'm looking at another one that's rolling out during SXSW: Aardvark.

Aardvark is social search meets … Read more