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This [1] makes one feel if Google is really interested in acquisitions like these or just tossing some money around.

[1] http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/09/02/google-closes-aardvark...

'Interested' is a hard to prove word. The best one can really say without statements from Google VIPs is that acquisitions frequently do not seem to lead to successful services and so they're probably better seen as either expensive acquihires or gambling on hits.

(I have an in-progress analysis of Google service/product shutdowns at http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns and one of the solider looking results so far is that even being generous and marking as 'alive' any acqusition's products which were merged into something like Maps or Google+, products which were part of an acquisition are much more likely to be shutdown than internally-developed products.)

Thanks for the link to your analysis. Should give it a read :)

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