One of my favourite search engines is Aardvark, which was a social search engine. It was designed so that you couldregister, tell it what you know about, and what you're interested in. Every now and then you'd get a little chat box popping up (mine was in Google chat), and it was from Aardvark, passing on a question from someone. If you could answer it, you could send your answer to the questioner and Aardvark would pass it on. Of course, if you had a question that you needed help with, you could ask yourself, and get an answer back. Really quickly - we're not talking Quora timelines here - while not instant, it was pretty good. Because the people who signed up were actually interested in their subjects and liked helping people.
Google bought it in February 2010 and moved most of the staff off onto other projects. Yesterday they announced in their blog:
"Aardvark was a start-up we acquired in 2010. An experiment in a new kind of social search, it helped people answer each other’s questions. While Aardvark will be closing, we’ll continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world."
That's it. With their usual brutal efficiency Google's culled it. Aardvark worked - and it worked really well, because it was doing something different and personal. To simply call something 'an experiment' which was worked on and used by a lot of people is not only insulting, it's a real slap in the face for the people who worked on it. The quote makes it look as though the closure has nothing to do with Google doesn't it. If it was that good (and it was, that's why Google bought it), why did Google close it? Perhaps because Aardvark wasn't running adverts and making Google money? The hypocrisy is rich - if Google is interested in enabling people to 'connect and discover richer knowledge', why not encourage Aardvark, and make it more powerful? Perhaps that quote would be more accurate if they'd added 'connect and discover richer knowledge by making us more money' it would have been more honest.
If you're getting that I'm upset about this, you're right. Google screws up their own products on a regular basis and closes them down, sweeping the remains under the carpet, but they're buying the competition and just killing it straight out. How is this 'do no evil'?
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