Google added another jewel to its vault, buying the up-and-coming social search site Aardvark on Thursday.

According to a report from Tech Crunch, Google reportedly paid $50 million for Aardvark.

Google Buys Aardvark

Like many companies in the Bay Area, Aardvark was started by two former Google employees. Before they sold the company, they had raised some $6 million in venture capital investments. The site was founded less than 3 years ago, in July of 2007.  At the time that it was sold, Aardvark had a total staff of 30 employees.

The social search site allows anyone to type in a specific question and wait for a user-generated response. In this way, Aardvark utilizes its entire network of users to answer the questions its users ask. This type of social search means that users can type questions that are much longer and more specific than a normal keyword search.

According to some within the industry, the model pioneered by Aardvark could well represent the future of how searching takes place on the internet.  Instead of browsing through pages and pages of results, some believe that our networks will soon be linked together so that we can acquire more relevant human advice through the use of more detail, specific questions.