AARDVARK

Aardvark (formerly Mechanical Zoo) is a social search engine, founded by a group of former [Google](/organization/google) employees. Aardvark that lets users ask questions that are distributed to the social graph for a quick and high quality answers. It [launched into private beta](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/29/mechanical-zoo-gets-6-million-to-build-aardvark-social-search-product/) in 2008. Aardvark is a way to get quick, quality answers to questions from your extended social network. ... You can ask questions via an instant message buddy or email. The questions are then farmed out to your contacts (and their contacts) based on what they say they have knowledge of. If you ask taste related questions about music, books, movies, restaurants, etc., they'll ask people who tend to show similar tastes as you in their profile. [Richard Chen](http://www.crunchbase.com/person/richard-chen-3) has invested in AardvarkMore