Google to Compete with other Social Networking Sites

Business and Corporate Law - Federal news February 10, 2010

San Francisco – Online search engine giant Google is set to compete with other social networking sites in providing services to people following announcement that it has acquired Aardvark, a San Francisco startup company. The agreement was signed by Damon Horowitz, Aadvark’s co-founder and chief technology officer and Google representatives.

The acquisition, which was rumored at $50 million, is expected to improve Google’s delivery of services to people. Google hopes to provide people with better and more trusted information and unlock the “vast amount of knowledge that has never been published to the web” through Aadvark.

Aadvark has built an Internet search engine based on human connections rather than digital links. The company is a kind of search engine-meets-social networking.

"People turn to the Web for subjective recommendations and reviews. You need a different kind of model than just Web search to handle that," Horowitz, also a former Google engineer who co-founded Aardvark in 2007, said in an interview with the Mercury News last year.

The two companies looked up to Facebook’ success as an example and compete in the field. Facebook now has more than 400 million users worldwide.