7 ms·

Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

125 points by ashishk 17y ago

aaronblohowiak 17y ago
What is the business case for Google in acquiring Aardvark?
- EricBurnett 17y ago
  Facebook is about getting information from your social circle, while Google search is about getting information from the internet at large. It seems they are looking at various ways to bridge that gap.
- cmanfu 17y ago
  Aardvark will integrate extremely naturally into Google Buzz.
  - hackerbob 17y ago
    When listening to Sergey talk about Google Buzz ten minutes into this video he brings up the value of using buzz to ask questions to his contacts with the recommendation system directing the question to who best can answer it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_W6Qbob2mg#t=10m10s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_W6Qbob2mg#t=10m10s I was like "this sounds like Aardvark".
    - aaronblohowiak 17y ago
      So why spend $50M when the integration path and implementation are reasonably well flushed out?
      - Sukotto 17y ago
        Cheaper than a lawsuit later
      - ericd 17y ago
        The recommendation system is not a trivial thing to create, I'm guessing Aardvark's rec system is at least part of it.
    - quilby 17y ago
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_W6Qbob2mg#t=0m16s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_W6Qbob2mg#t=0m16s Really? Pagerank doesnt have anything to do with twitter and facebook. Its a great idea, and its probably one of the major factors that made google a success, but today it is not a very important factor in google being a bigger company than fb and twitter.
      - hackerbob 17y ago
        Perhaps I poorly worded by saying "ten minutes in", I meant starting from 10 minute and 10 second mark Sergey brings up how he's been using the service internally. Edit:But going back to your point, I not sure Pagerank is relevant to twitter/facebook, and I don't think Sergey was saying that it was. But I do think their could be search problem emerging in social networks when people start having several hundred friends and you want to find relevant conversations to your interests going on within your network.
- jackowayed 17y ago
  One thing they probably really like is the natural language parsing. It's surprisingly good (though by no means perfect) at automatically tagging your question. For example, looking through my old questions, I think it automatically tagged "what's a good place to get a cheap SSL certificate? I don't think I need wildcard subdomains" as "SSL". In a perfect world, you ask Google a question just like you'd ask a person a question, and they answer it with the info you want, so they might be interested in the technology and people that make this intelligent tagging work as a step in that direction.
  - aaronblohowiak 17y ago
    Ah, thanks for that analysis. This is a part that I was missing.
  - shafqat 17y ago
    Not to be snarky, but what is impressive about tagging your question with "SSL" - the exact keyword is in the question. No semantic analysis or NLP required - just simple keyword based entity extraction.
    - jackowayed 17y ago
      I know, it's not brilliant, but SSL wasn't in a particularly special place in the sentence or anything that would make it easy for a computer to figure it out. Compare that question to something like "I am using Rails. How do I ...?", where a computer would have a pretty easy time of figuring out that Rails is important with some simple parsing logic.
      - bigbang 17y ago
        Not quite true. Using the standard TF-IDF would have definitely figured out SSL.
- staunch 17y ago
  It kills a potential rival that could one day grow into a threat. Yahoo didn't acquire Google when they could have. Google has in its DNA the desire to prevent the same embarrassing disaster. IMHO.
- richardw 17y ago
  The database could be mined to improve answers in Google. When someone asks "what is the best X in Y", Google will know and MS won't. They might have some as-yet-undisclosed IP which one of the big search companies would be able to defend - rather own it than fight it. Also, integrating the already-refined code and ideas into Buzz, Wave, Orkut, other future social initiatives.
ashishk 17y ago
I'm interested to see how this develops. I'd hate for google to drop the ball (a la dodgeball, omnisio, etc.). Vark is such a unique, useful service.
- icco 17y ago
  I'd be curious to know how you use the service. Most of the questions I see asked on it seem pretty poor and uninformative.
  - martian 17y ago
    If you ask an interesting, detailed question, you'll usually get something unique in return. An example of a question (and an awesome answer) I submitted: http://vark.com/t/cad4a0 http://vark.com/t/cad4a0
    - frossie 17y ago
      You thought that was an awesome answer? IMHO the top Google result for the search "Borges where to start" gives a better one. Like many social networking features, I don't get this one. I sorta-know what my friends know - I am more interested in stuff my friends don't know.
      - jackowayed 17y ago
        It's not just limited to your friends. I have a fairly small network on vark (~8 people I think), but I think only 1 time have I actually gotten a question from one of my friends. It extends to friends of friends and even just random people if it doesn't think your friends know or they choose not to answer. I've also never actually gotten a question from a friend.
    - yeeyay 17y ago
      Why not Yahoo Answers? I have used it and gotten pretty satisfactory answers thus far. Infact, I posed your exact same question on Y A now and I already have an answer. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Au8X0fm5n8cpX9DAQIDHq9_sy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20100211180722AAy1SN5 http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Au8X0fm5n8cpX9D...
jamiequint 17y ago
This price seems really high considering the amount of traction aardvark had (not much). $50M is a pricey talent acquisition
- carson 17y ago
  It may not be too high if you look at the VC money they had raised. $6M had been invested so if that was a 50% stake then you are looking at a 4x return for the VC. Isn't that about right?
  - jdrock 17y ago
    The buyer doesn't do his valuation based on what's put into the company.
    - carson 17y ago
      I'm not sure the comment was about valuation it was about the purchase price. The buyer has to pay what the company is willing to take and part of that equation is how much the VCs that gave them $6M want for a return.
    - webwright 17y ago
      Not true (or at least not ALWAYS true). Do you think corpdev guys are immune to anchoring? Here's a study: "Take a minute and answer this two-part question: 1. Is the percentage of African nations in the United Nations higher or lower than 65? 2. What is the percentage of African nations in the United Nations? This was one of the queries that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman posed in their 1974 paper in Science called “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” It turns out that the answer you provide to the second question is heavily swayed by that first question. The average estimate for question two was above 45 percent. When question one was lowered from 65 percent to 10 percent, the average estimation of question two was dropped to 25 percent. " Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/files/26237737-fixed-to-flexible-the-ebook.pdf http://sethgodin.typepad.com/files/26237737-fixed-to-flexibl... In a financial negotiation, setting an anchor can be powerful. a VC investment (and accompanying valuation) is an anchor.
bgraves 17y ago
Wow! I've been an avid 'Varker for sometime now and this is very surprising! I think this is probably more of a talent acquisition than anything: Just the _highlights_ from http://vark.com/team http://vark.com/team * Max Ventilla - former Googler; marketing and monetization * Nathan Stoll - former Googler; headed Google News for three years * Fritz Schneider - former Googler; founded and led Google's Firefox and Safe Browsing teams * Winton Davies - founding member of Yahoo Research Labs and a Principal Research Engineer at Overture, GoTo, and Cadabra. * Bill MacCartney - former Googler; designed an automated question answering system at Google Research * Sameer Paranjpye - founded and headed Yahoo’s Grid Computing team, responsible for the Apache Hadoop project -- Aardvark has also come out with some great research projects in the past few weeks/months. [http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf] "Back in October, we wrote a research paper entitled 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine' and submitted it to WWW 2010. We found out last week that it has been accepted, so we wanted to share a preview with you today! Our paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine', in which =>Sergey Brin and Larry Page<= originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference."
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- rdouble 17y ago
  Re-hiring a bunch of ex-employees does not look like a talent acquisition. It looks more like someone was shrewd enough to become buddies with the M&A department the first time around.
  - bgraves 17y ago
    Sorry, would you care to elaborate? I'm not really sure what you mean by "the M&A department the first time around". I think the fact that only _some_ of the team members are ex-Googlers is significant. Additionally, what other business case could their be to purchase such a small, new company. Couldn't Google just have integrated these features into their shiny new Buzz service _last week_ and have overshadowed Vark very quickly?
geuis 17y ago
Saw these guys at Facebook HQ a couple months ago. Seemed like during their entire presentation they were trying to pitch their company to someone with purchasing power at FB
- beermann 17y ago
  ha, I was one of the presenters there, for Sharendipity. You're right that Aardvark didn't talk much about the tech, considering it was for Developer Fridays. They did focus a lot on expanding the ways you could use the social graph in FB though. I thought it was nice to see that they've been acquired, although I thought the price tag was a bit surprising.
epi0Bauqu 17y ago
Where do they get this valuation from? That's greater than $500/user, and their growth curve doesn't look exponential by any means: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/vark.com/?metric=uv http://siteanalytics.compete.com/vark.com/?metric=uv. (Yes, I know compete sucks, but often the shape is correct.) Talent doesn't make sense at that price, more like a few million. The tech can't be that out of the ordinary for Google given they just launched Buzz and Wave. So what was it that deserved that price? Bidding war?
- agotterer 17y ago
  A lot of their service runs over IM and other non trackable tools. But it does seem like a high valuation. I assume its a talent + technology acquisition and not a play for eyeballs?
seldo 17y ago
While there is definitely a bunch of talent on the team, I'd say this is definitely a technology acquisition, but specifically a UI acquisition -- Google could build the back-end to vark tomorrow, but the user interaction is something they could never have come up with. This is also why they should acquire Yelp -- it's not about the tech (in fact, Yelp is built on Google maps). It's about the interface.
- derwiki 17y ago
  The map part seems like an easily switchable component, and the bulk of Yelp is the community and the reviews themselves. Also, I think other parts of Yelp use Bing and Yahoo maps.
  - seldo 17y ago
    Sure, but my point is that Yelp's core tech of storing venue information, ratings and reviews is not "hard" -- Google and Yahoo both have services that do this. But it beats the pants off of them because its user interface and social dynamics encourage better data.
    - derwiki 17y ago
      I'll definitely agree with that. Google seems to have a hard time creating a community with their offerings.
capablanca 17y ago
That's 1000 dollars per user (that created content). Isn't that too much? Is this value important?
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  I don't think this is an effort to acquire users.
  - davidmurphy 17y ago
    Good point -- Google's got a bunch of users, I hear. ;-)
kevinpet 17y ago
From Google's point of view, it's worth it. If they think they could develop this in-house for $5 million, and maybe it'd be great, maybe it'd be okay, and maybe it would suck. Spending $50 million to let them have the pick of proven technology that they can already see working before spending the money removes the risk.
sachinag 17y ago
$50 million is the same price as GrandCentral, which became Google Voice. It's all but impossible to tell how important strategically any one acquisition is to Google until they execute on it. This feels more important than Jaiku/Dodgeball, but really, only time will tell if $50 million was a bargain or a giveaway.
- axod 17y ago
  For a small forum with not much traction, only something like 3000 questions posted a day, it seems slightly insane to me... Sometimes I guess acquisitions are just random, and likely more about the people involved than anything else.
mixmax 17y ago
Assuming VC's got 30% of the company that's a payout of $15 million from an investment of $6 million giving a little more than 100% a return on investment. These numbers are educated guesses of course, but it doesn't seem like the VC's got a lot out of this. Normally it's expected that the homeruns give a 1000% return on investment.
- stanleydrew 17y ago
  150% ROI to be exact, which is more than "a little more than 100%," but certainly not the order of magnitude more the VCs were probably looking for. Based on your assumptions though, is it fair to say the founders probably exerted quite a bit of control over when to sell, and if so why do you think they would do that? Desperate to return to Google? ;)
heyrhett 17y ago
me: Why did google pay so much money for Aardvark, the company made by the mechanical zoo? aardvark: Got it. I'm sending your question to someone who knows about Aardvark. (Type 'tag' to fix that label, 'more' for options, or 'cancel'.) Sent at 2:51 PM on Thursday aardvark: (Update: No response yet from people who know about Aardvark -- but I'm still looking. Type 'tag:' followed by a different category to try other people.) Sent at 3:01 PM on Thursday aardvark: (An answer just arrived... From Derek P./28/M/Brookville,PA, Re: Aardvark) That's what I'm trying to find out. I tend to hate services like this, that are for people too dumb to Google. ... WAIT A MINUTE?! (To reply, type 'Derek:' followed by a message, or type 'flag' if this answer is inappropriate. Type 'more' for options.)

125 points by ashishk 17y ago

aaronblohowiak 17y ago

What is the business case for Google in acquiring Aardvark?

EricBurnett 17y ago
Facebook is about getting information from your social circle, while Google search is about getting information from the internet at large. It seems they are looking at various ways to bridge that gap.
cmanfu 17y ago
Aardvark will integrate extremely naturally into Google Buzz.
- hackerbob 17y ago
  When listening to Sergey talk about Google Buzz ten minutes into this video he brings up the value of using buzz to ask questions to his contacts with the recommendation system directing the question to who best can answer it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_W6Qbob2mg#t=10m10s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_W6Qbob2mg#t=10m10s I was like "this sounds like Aardvark".
  - aaronblohowiak 17y ago
    So why spend $50M when the integration path and implementation are reasonably well flushed out?
    - Sukotto 17y ago
      Cheaper than a lawsuit later
    - ericd 17y ago
      The recommendation system is not a trivial thing to create, I'm guessing Aardvark's rec system is at least part of it.
  - quilby 17y ago
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_W6Qbob2mg#t=0m16s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_W6Qbob2mg#t=0m16s Really? Pagerank doesnt have anything to do with twitter and facebook. Its a great idea, and its probably one of the major factors that made google a success, but today it is not a very important factor in google being a bigger company than fb and twitter.
    - hackerbob 17y ago
      Perhaps I poorly worded by saying "ten minutes in", I meant starting from 10 minute and 10 second mark Sergey brings up how he's been using the service internally. Edit:But going back to your point, I not sure Pagerank is relevant to twitter/facebook, and I don't think Sergey was saying that it was. But I do think their could be search problem emerging in social networks when people start having several hundred friends and you want to find relevant conversations to your interests going on within your network.
jackowayed 17y ago
One thing they probably really like is the natural language parsing. It's surprisingly good (though by no means perfect) at automatically tagging your question. For example, looking through my old questions, I think it automatically tagged "what's a good place to get a cheap SSL certificate? I don't think I need wildcard subdomains" as "SSL". In a perfect world, you ask Google a question just like you'd ask a person a question, and they answer it with the info you want, so they might be interested in the technology and people that make this intelligent tagging work as a step in that direction.
- aaronblohowiak 17y ago
  Ah, thanks for that analysis. This is a part that I was missing.
- shafqat 17y ago
  Not to be snarky, but what is impressive about tagging your question with "SSL" - the exact keyword is in the question. No semantic analysis or NLP required - just simple keyword based entity extraction.
  - jackowayed 17y ago
    I know, it's not brilliant, but SSL wasn't in a particularly special place in the sentence or anything that would make it easy for a computer to figure it out. Compare that question to something like "I am using Rails. How do I ...?", where a computer would have a pretty easy time of figuring out that Rails is important with some simple parsing logic.
    - bigbang 17y ago
      Not quite true. Using the standard TF-IDF would have definitely figured out SSL.
staunch 17y ago
It kills a potential rival that could one day grow into a threat. Yahoo didn't acquire Google when they could have. Google has in its DNA the desire to prevent the same embarrassing disaster. IMHO.
richardw 17y ago
The database could be mined to improve answers in Google. When someone asks "what is the best X in Y", Google will know and MS won't. They might have some as-yet-undisclosed IP which one of the big search companies would be able to defend - rather own it than fight it. Also, integrating the already-refined code and ideas into Buzz, Wave, Orkut, other future social initiatives.

ashishk 17y ago

I'm interested to see how this develops. I'd hate for google to drop the ball (a la dodgeball, omnisio, etc.). Vark is such a unique, useful service.

icco 17y ago
I'd be curious to know how you use the service. Most of the questions I see asked on it seem pretty poor and uninformative.
- martian 17y ago
  If you ask an interesting, detailed question, you'll usually get something unique in return. An example of a question (and an awesome answer) I submitted: http://vark.com/t/cad4a0 http://vark.com/t/cad4a0
  - frossie 17y ago
    You thought that was an awesome answer? IMHO the top Google result for the search "Borges where to start" gives a better one. Like many social networking features, I don't get this one. I sorta-know what my friends know - I am more interested in stuff my friends don't know.
    - jackowayed 17y ago
      It's not just limited to your friends. I have a fairly small network on vark (~8 people I think), but I think only 1 time have I actually gotten a question from one of my friends. It extends to friends of friends and even just random people if it doesn't think your friends know or they choose not to answer. I've also never actually gotten a question from a friend.
  - yeeyay 17y ago
    Why not Yahoo Answers? I have used it and gotten pretty satisfactory answers thus far. Infact, I posed your exact same question on Y A now and I already have an answer. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Au8X0fm5n8cpX9DAQIDHq9_sy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20100211180722AAy1SN5 http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Au8X0fm5n8cpX9D...

jamiequint 17y ago

This price seems really high considering the amount of traction aardvark had (not much). $50M is a pricey talent acquisition

carson 17y ago
It may not be too high if you look at the VC money they had raised. $6M had been invested so if that was a 50% stake then you are looking at a 4x return for the VC. Isn't that about right?
- jdrock 17y ago
  The buyer doesn't do his valuation based on what's put into the company.
  - carson 17y ago
    I'm not sure the comment was about valuation it was about the purchase price. The buyer has to pay what the company is willing to take and part of that equation is how much the VCs that gave them $6M want for a return.
  - webwright 17y ago
    Not true (or at least not ALWAYS true). Do you think corpdev guys are immune to anchoring? Here's a study: "Take a minute and answer this two-part question: 1. Is the percentage of African nations in the United Nations higher or lower than 65? 2. What is the percentage of African nations in the United Nations? This was one of the queries that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman posed in their 1974 paper in Science called “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” It turns out that the answer you provide to the second question is heavily swayed by that first question. The average estimate for question two was above 45 percent. When question one was lowered from 65 percent to 10 percent, the average estimation of question two was dropped to 25 percent. " Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/files/26237737-fixed-to-flexible-the-ebook.pdf http://sethgodin.typepad.com/files/26237737-fixed-to-flexibl... In a financial negotiation, setting an anchor can be powerful. a VC investment (and accompanying valuation) is an anchor.

bgraves 17y ago

Wow! I've been an avid 'Varker for sometime now and this is very surprising! I think this is probably more of a talent acquisition than anything: Just the _highlights_ from http://vark.com/team http://vark.com/team * Max Ventilla - former Googler; marketing and monetization * Nathan Stoll - former Googler; headed Google News for three years * Fritz Schneider - former Googler; founded and led Google's Firefox and Safe Browsing teams * Winton Davies - founding member of Yahoo Research Labs and a Principal Research Engineer at Overture, GoTo, and Cadabra. * Bill MacCartney - former Googler; designed an automated question answering system at Google Research * Sameer Paranjpye - founded and headed Yahoo’s Grid Computing team, responsible for the Apache Hadoop project -- Aardvark has also come out with some great research projects in the past few weeks/months. [http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf] "Back in October, we wrote a research paper entitled 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine' and submitted it to WWW 2010. We found out last week that it has been accepted, so we wanted to share a preview with you today! Our paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, 'Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine', in which =>Sergey Brin and Larry Page<= originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference."

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
rdouble 17y ago
Re-hiring a bunch of ex-employees does not look like a talent acquisition. It looks more like someone was shrewd enough to become buddies with the M&A department the first time around.
- bgraves 17y ago
  Sorry, would you care to elaborate? I'm not really sure what you mean by "the M&A department the first time around". I think the fact that only _some_ of the team members are ex-Googlers is significant. Additionally, what other business case could their be to purchase such a small, new company. Couldn't Google just have integrated these features into their shiny new Buzz service _last week_ and have overshadowed Vark very quickly?

geuis 17y ago

Saw these guys at Facebook HQ a couple months ago. Seemed like during their entire presentation they were trying to pitch their company to someone with purchasing power at FB

beermann 17y ago
ha, I was one of the presenters there, for Sharendipity. You're right that Aardvark didn't talk much about the tech, considering it was for Developer Fridays. They did focus a lot on expanding the ways you could use the social graph in FB though. I thought it was nice to see that they've been acquired, although I thought the price tag was a bit surprising.

epi0Bauqu 17y ago

Where do they get this valuation from? That's greater than $500/user, and their growth curve doesn't look exponential by any means: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/vark.com/?metric=uv http://siteanalytics.compete.com/vark.com/?metric=uv. (Yes, I know compete sucks, but often the shape is correct.) Talent doesn't make sense at that price, more like a few million. The tech can't be that out of the ordinary for Google given they just launched Buzz and Wave. So what was it that deserved that price? Bidding war?

agotterer 17y ago
A lot of their service runs over IM and other non trackable tools. But it does seem like a high valuation. I assume its a talent + technology acquisition and not a play for eyeballs?

seldo 17y ago

While there is definitely a bunch of talent on the team, I'd say this is definitely a technology acquisition, but specifically a UI acquisition -- Google could build the back-end to vark tomorrow, but the user interaction is something they could never have come up with. This is also why they should acquire Yelp -- it's not about the tech (in fact, Yelp is built on Google maps). It's about the interface.

derwiki 17y ago
The map part seems like an easily switchable component, and the bulk of Yelp is the community and the reviews themselves. Also, I think other parts of Yelp use Bing and Yahoo maps.
- seldo 17y ago
  Sure, but my point is that Yelp's core tech of storing venue information, ratings and reviews is not "hard" -- Google and Yahoo both have services that do this. But it beats the pants off of them because its user interface and social dynamics encourage better data.
  - derwiki 17y ago
    I'll definitely agree with that. Google seems to have a hard time creating a community with their offerings.

capablanca 17y ago

That's 1000 dollars per user (that created content). Isn't that too much? Is this value important?

aaronblohowiak 17y ago
I don't think this is an effort to acquire users.
- davidmurphy 17y ago
  Good point -- Google's got a bunch of users, I hear. ;-)

kevinpet 17y ago

From Google's point of view, it's worth it. If they think they could develop this in-house for $5 million, and maybe it'd be great, maybe it'd be okay, and maybe it would suck. Spending $50 million to let them have the pick of proven technology that they can already see working before spending the money removes the risk.

sachinag 17y ago

$50 million is the same price as GrandCentral, which became Google Voice. It's all but impossible to tell how important strategically any one acquisition is to Google until they execute on it. This feels more important than Jaiku/Dodgeball, but really, only time will tell if $50 million was a bargain or a giveaway.

axod 17y ago
For a small forum with not much traction, only something like 3000 questions posted a day, it seems slightly insane to me... Sometimes I guess acquisitions are just random, and likely more about the people involved than anything else.

mixmax 17y ago

Assuming VC's got 30% of the company that's a payout of $15 million from an investment of $6 million giving a little more than 100% a return on investment. These numbers are educated guesses of course, but it doesn't seem like the VC's got a lot out of this. Normally it's expected that the homeruns give a 1000% return on investment.

stanleydrew 17y ago
150% ROI to be exact, which is more than "a little more than 100%," but certainly not the order of magnitude more the VCs were probably looking for. Based on your assumptions though, is it fair to say the founders probably exerted quite a bit of control over when to sell, and if so why do you think they would do that? Desperate to return to Google? ;)

heyrhett 17y ago

me: Why did google pay so much money for Aardvark, the company made by the mechanical zoo? aardvark: Got it. I'm sending your question to someone who knows about Aardvark. (Type 'tag' to fix that label, 'more' for options, or 'cancel'.) Sent at 2:51 PM on Thursday aardvark: (Update: No response yet from people who know about Aardvark -- but I'm still looking. Type 'tag:' followed by a different category to try other people.) Sent at 3:01 PM on Thursday aardvark: (An answer just arrived... From Derek P./28/M/Brookville,PA, Re: Aardvark) That's what I'm trying to find out. I tend to hate services like this, that are for people too dumb to Google. ... WAIT A MINUTE?! (To reply, type 'Derek:' followed by a message, or type 'flag' if this answer is inappropriate. Type 'more' for options.)