Yesterday we broke the news that Aardvark , the social search engine, was being acquired by Google for $50 million. Aardvark confirmed the acquisition to us yesterday (though they didn’t comment on the amount), and now Google and Aardvark have publicly announced the deal with posts to their official blogs , along with some more details about how Aardvark will be integrated with Google. Unlike some of Google’s past startup acquisitions that  resulted in services shutting down or restricting new user signups, Aardvark is going to continue running at full steam.  New users can still sign up, and it’s already featured as part of Google Labs (though it hasn’t been integrated with Google search at all — it’s just a link to Vark.com). As far as changes to the service, a Q&A on the Aardvark blog says that they’ll be able to move faster as Google puts its support behind it (some Googlers will be joining the Aardvark team). CrunchBase Information Aardvark Google Information provided by CrunchBase

I’ve been a fan of Apple’s Mail.app for quite some time, even though we’ve had our ups and downs , it’s gotten the job done. One of my biggest beefs with Mail.app is searching through past emails. It’s just horrible. Central Atomics is hoping to fix that problem with Rocketbox . Rocketbox is a new way of searching your e-mail in Apple Mail.app — it’s more advanced than Mail’s search, with the ability to search by person, a search engine that is up to 200x faster than Mail’s, and powerful filters that make it easy to find what you need. One neat thing about Rocketbox is its search-by-person suggestions.  Rocketbox analyzes your e-mail correspondence and provides a list of important contacts when you search, so you know who you’ve emailed the most. Also, Rocketbox will show you Inline previews, with highlighted snippets telling you why a message was found, making it easier to scan through emails. The highlighted section then helps you improve your queries and takes the guess work out of using search. Rocketbox is extremely similar to Xobni , which is the Windows alternative, with a few more features like social network information, and contact information, etc. Overall, Rocketbox is a great addition to Mail.app, and the entire search experience. You can get a 30 day trial, or buy the full version or $14.95, but the first 100 TechCrunch readers to use the code “ TECHCRUNCH “ can get Rocketbox for $9.95, instead of the regular $14.95, when checking out. CrunchBase Information Central Atomics Information provided by CrunchBase

Microsoft is shedding the beta tag for its custom Bing search engine that caters to users in the United Kingdom with a localized offering. At the same time, the company is releasing Bing Maps UK and thus no longer redirecting users to Multimap.com .

Google released a new mobile navigation app today and GPS navigation companies such as Garmin And TomTom saw their shares take a plunge . The announcement shaved $1.2 billion off of Garmin’s market cap alone. It’s shares are down more than 16 percent so far today to $31.60. TomTom’s shares are down 21 percent to $8.11. And this is just for an Android app. But Google could very well make it available to other phones as well, and that is what has investors worried. GPS navigation apps are among the most expensive, and most lucrative, of all mobile apps. TomTom sells its iPhone apps for $50 to $100, with a different app per country . Google just cut the traditional GPS navigation companies at the knees by releasing what may be a far superior product for free. It is not a standalone navigation app. Rather it taps into a lot of the resources Google makes available on the Web, including Google Maps, Streetview, voice recognition, and sophisticated search. You can use voice search just as you would look for something on Google’s search engine. “Where is the Pizza Hut in downtown Palo Alto”? If Google’s search engine can find it, then so can Google’s navigation app. Garmin and TomTom can’t compete with that kind of Web-scale computing power. And Google is happy to give its navigation app away for free because it leverages many existing technologies it has already built for the Web, and it encourages more people to use Web-capable phones and do local searches on them. It’s strategy is to give the software away for free, and make money on the search ads. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Gazopa , a search engine that uses features from an image to retrieve similar images, has been in private beta since it launched during TechCrunch50 last year . To recap, Gazopa lets users upload a picture, enter a URL of an image, create a drawing or right-click on an image anywhere on the web (via a plug-in ) and retrieves similar images. A thumbnail of a video is enough to look for similar videos. Results are mainly filtered through analyzing the color and shape of the object or person pictured. Upload a picture of a red car, for example, and Gazopa will find pictures of similar cars on the web – without you having to type any keywords (search via keywords is also possible though). Since September 2008, more than 40,000 users have tested the service, which entered open beta today. And Hitachi America , the company behind Gazopa, has used customer feedback to improve the quality of search results, tweak the site’s design and add a number of features in the past year. One of the most notable additions is the Gazopa iPhone app ( iTunes link ), which is pretty cool and lets you take and upload photos with your iPhone to quickly get similar images off the web. The app has all of the main features of the web version and is free. There’s also a new Gazopa Drawing Facebook application . Gazopa now allows users to browse through Flickr images and filter out those without a Creative Commons license. When you hover over a particular image, Gazopa will show you its size, how similar it is to the one the search is based upon, licensing details and a URL that will take you the picture’s Flickr page. Another new feature is the news tab under which users can find images related to the latest news. Those images can be filtered by time (uploaded within one month, a year etc.), shape and size. Granted these aren’t earth-shattering new features, but GazoPa has indexed over 60 million images so far that can be searched even if they have no or inaccurate meta data. The open beta version is still a bit buggy but more than OK for a test run. One major point that leaves room for improvement is that searching for inanimate objects with distinctive features seems to lead to significantly better results than searching for human beings that look similar. It would be nice if Gazopa could at least distinguish between men and women, for example, which isn’t always the case. Asked what differentiates his service from Google Labs’ similar search service , Gazopa project leader Hideki Kobayashi said that Google doesn’t let users find similar images of all images displayed and that uploading a picture by yourself isn’t possible. Gazopa also competes with “reverse image search engine” TinEye , which, however, doesn’t necessarily look for “similar” images but tries to find exact matches of pictures instead. Here’s a demo video for Gazopa’s open beta version: Screenshots: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors