Is Google becoming a Start Up Incubator?

  Google is sending a message that if you leave Google and build something cool for the Web, the search engine may buy you out. The acquisitions of  Aardvark and AppJet by Google prove that theory.  Max Ventillaa and Nathan Stoll founded the social search engine company, Advark. Google paid $25 billion dollar for the acquisition. Max and Nathan used to work at Google’s AdSense and Web Applications development and Google News respectively. Now, they are working on vark.com search engine under Google Labs.

We have spent the past two years carefully designing and building Aardvark, combining our own vision with a rigorous user-driven development process. This acquisition represents an incredible opportunity to accelerate this development, working with some of the most amazing folks in the industry to offer a new kind of search to hundreds of millions of people.

Appjet makes cute live document editing tool called EtherPad. It is going to be used to improve real-time collaboration tool Google Wave. CEO Aaron Iba of Appjet worked earlier at Google writing algorithms for improving search quality.

“The reason they decided to go with Google was that they were literally overwhelmed by Wave: after meeting the Wave guys, they were so impressed that they (a) wanted to work on Wave themselves, and (b) didn’t want to compete with it. After watching the Appjets tough it out for the past two years, I knew they weren’t simply being cowards, ” said Paul Graham, partner for AppJet investor Y Combinator.

So Google always look for potential business opportunity and they are ready to shell out money to buy any innovating product. But the company is not ready to buy every cool product on the Web.  They are only interested to invest in a profitable business opportunity. It is good to know for the CEOs when they leave Google, they can incubate something and approach Google to sell the product so that the start up company can grow further under the new ownership.