Aardvark was a quirky little social answering service that Google purchased in 2010 for $50 million. The company was a small start-up founded in 2007 and launched to the public in 2009. Users registered for an account and indicated areas of expertise, with the intent of mainly answering quick questions off the top of their heads. All users could then ask each other (or rather the “hivemind”) questions which would be fielded to people who theoretically had some expertise in the area. Aardvark relied mainly on instant messaging and used email as a secondary contact method. This contrasted with other question answering services, like Yahoo! Answers and Answerbag, which are website based.

via Google Aardvark.