Google Acquires Metaweb To Make Search Smarter - I’m almost getting sick of noting every time Google buys a company I really like.
This one worries me a bit, as a lot of their work involves open data, and I hope that isn’t impeded. Metaweb’s Freebase was essentially started as a response to Google Base being a closed system. I guess we’ll see.
I’ve had this draft post about Aardvark for about two weeks now. Now that they’ve been acquired by Google, I guess it’s about time to finally publish it.
I first heard about Aardvark via the Seattle Tech Startups mailing list and eventually got around to trying it. Few things get past my initial attempt, but I’ve still got Aardvark. It’s a question-and-answer service where you can ask questions yourself and answer questions of others.
What I’ve enjoyed the most about Aardvark (beyond it’s ability to send questions to the right people) is how easy to use and friendly it is. I interact with it via instant messenger, and every message it sends me includes all the instructions I need, in a friendly way, without being too verbose either. It’s impossible to not understand how to use it.
Recently they published a paper - Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine (the name is a reference to a famous Google paper) - which I found quite interesting. I was expecting more statistics about the usefulness and value of Aardvark than the paper had, however the interesting part is that Aardvark turned out to be far more sophisticated than I’d realized. As I read it I’d think of a way to make it even better, and later on in the paper, find that they’d already done that. One astonishing graphic in the paper is their graph of users over time; that’s some impressive growth.
Now that Google’s bought them, I only hope that they’ll allow the founders to keep doing the good job they’ve been doing… I’ve seen too many excellent products wither after acquisition (e.g. dodgeball and jotspot).
Blogdigger Dev Blog: Blogdigger Acquired by Odeo - very interesting news. Back in March 2003 Dave Winer blogged that perhaps there should be a search engine based off data in RSS feeds. Three people started coding that weekend, Greg Gershman, Scott Johnson, and François Schiettecatte, forming BlogDigger, Roogle, and RSS-Search.
Scott’s “Roogle” launched by Mondayish, was Slashdotted to death, and and became Feedster. Scott and François both decided to make a company out of their ventures, and realizing that they lived in Boston, merged into Feedster. Greg later incorporated BlogDigger, but didn’t take quite the same route. I became online friends with them all to varying degrees, got to intern at Feedster in 2005, and also met Greg during that time. Although it never really attained the prestige that Feedster did, BlogDigger was always cool to me. Greg added searching by category (now generally called tags these days) thanks to my suggestion. His geo-based search is pretty nice, despite the fairly small number of geocoded blogs.
Feedster is 404ing these days, later PubSub died. Technorati eventually added searching to their backlink features, but they are struggling to some extent these days. The likes of Google Blogsearch hardly help. At any rate, Greg hung in there, and it is great to see it living on even further, and I hope him the best at his new job.
I think there are two web companies in the last few years that I’ve really wrote here about how great I thought they were, JotSpot and Feedburner. Now 2/2 acquired by Google… of course, let’s hope this purchase goes better for Feedburner than it appears the JotSpot one went for them.
Official Google Blog: Spot On - Google has bought JotSpot; this is big news to me (and far, far more interesting than YouTube).
I’ve considered applying to work at JotSpot in the past, but one of the reasons I didn’t is that their stuff seemed so good I wasn’t sure if I had anything to add. I first wrote about JotSpot in October 2004. Crazy.
This doesn’t bode very well for Microsoft, that’s for sure. If Google plays their cards right, that is.
TechCrunch » Rumor: Yahoo Acquired Jotspot - I don’t usually report on breaking news rumours but this one is very interesting, because Jotspot is such an amazing company/product.
This is a very significant move. Need I say more? Events and calendaring are gearing up to be huge. Does this deal have anything to do with the Google Calendar rumours? Via Software Only.
This isn’t even a rumour, just speculation. it occurred to me that Navteq is probably on Google’s radar for possible acquisition.