<story><title>Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/11/google-acquires-aardvark-for-50-million/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bgraves</author><text>Wow! I&apos;ve been an avid &apos;Varker for sometime now and this is very surprising!&lt;p&gt;I think this is probably more of a talent acquisition than anything:&lt;p&gt;Just the _highlights_ from &lt;a href=&quot;http://vark.com/team&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://vark.com/team&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;* Max Ventilla - former Googler; marketing and monetization&lt;p&gt;* Nathan Stoll - former Googler; headed Google News for three years&lt;p&gt;* Fritz Schneider - former Googler; founded and led Google&apos;s Firefox and Safe Browsing teams&lt;p&gt;* Winton Davies - founding member of Yahoo Research Labs and a Principal Research Engineer at Overture, GoTo, and Cadabra.&lt;p&gt;* Bill MacCartney - former Googler; designed an automated question answering system at Google Research&lt;p&gt;* Sameer Paranjpye - founded and headed Yahoo’s Grid Computing team, responsible for the Apache Hadoop project&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;Aardvark has also come out with some great research projects in the past few weeks/months. [&lt;a href=&quot;http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;p&gt;&quot;Back in October, we wrote a research paper entitled &apos;Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine&apos; 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!&lt;p&gt;Our paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, &apos;Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine&apos;, in which =&amp;#62;Sergey Brin and Larry Page&amp;#60;= originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seiji</author><text>There was a time I believed all corporate activities were based only on merit.  Anything not completely merit derived would be illegal.  That&apos;s what we&apos;re made to believe with all kinds of anti-descriminition laws (you can&apos;t ask age, about kids, etc during interviews for example).&lt;p&gt;It turns out, everything is friend based.  Know rich people?  They&apos;ll help you get rich too.  Have a project you don&apos;t want to do inside of Google?  Just quit, make it anyway, then they&apos;ll re-hire you with a $5M per head bonus.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d find it delightful if I were in such a position, but I&apos;m not.  Not only am I not, but the more technical side of me doesn&apos;t want to play social games to become ingratiated to the decision makers.  Deep down, I still believe the world is merit based -- and that&apos;s one reason why I&apos;m still a nobody doing nothing going nowhere.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d be better off not reading HN most days.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/11/google-acquires-aardvark-for-50-million/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bgraves</author><text>Wow! I&apos;ve been an avid &apos;Varker for sometime now and this is very surprising!&lt;p&gt;I think this is probably more of a talent acquisition than anything:&lt;p&gt;Just the _highlights_ from &lt;a href=&quot;http://vark.com/team&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://vark.com/team&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;* Max Ventilla - former Googler; marketing and monetization&lt;p&gt;* Nathan Stoll - former Googler; headed Google News for three years&lt;p&gt;* Fritz Schneider - former Googler; founded and led Google&apos;s Firefox and Safe Browsing teams&lt;p&gt;* Winton Davies - founding member of Yahoo Research Labs and a Principal Research Engineer at Overture, GoTo, and Cadabra.&lt;p&gt;* Bill MacCartney - former Googler; designed an automated question answering system at Google Research&lt;p&gt;* Sameer Paranjpye - founded and headed Yahoo’s Grid Computing team, responsible for the Apache Hadoop project&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;Aardvark has also come out with some great research projects in the past few weeks/months. [&lt;a href=&quot;http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;p&gt;&quot;Back in October, we wrote a research paper entitled &apos;Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine&apos; 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!&lt;p&gt;Our paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, &apos;Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine&apos;, in which =&amp;#62;Sergey Brin and Larry Page&amp;#60;= originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference.&quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rdouble</author><text>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&amp;#38;A department the first time around.</text></comment>