Google acquires another...Aardvark!

This announcement should come as no surprise as Google is becoming increasingly social (buzz,wave et al) these days. Aardvark is basically a Q&A service, crowd-sourcing your social network to find the most relevant people who can answer your query.

It is potentially valuable to Google for the following:

• Every time people use these services to answer queries, Google looses potential searches and consequently ad revenue
• Google gets more valuable, relevant data stream to mine and match for future searches
• Helps differentiate from Facebook and Twitter
• Potentially can be used in the corporates as an in-house(or external) resource to effectively leverage the knowledge pool present within the company

If done right, Aardvark thus appeals to both business and social users bringing more people under the Google umbrella.