Yesterday, news broke that Google was acquiring social Q&A site Aardvark for about $50 million. Aardvark sent its users an email today saying:

Dear friends,

Aardvark will remain fully operational and completely free, providing quick, helpful answers to all of your questions.  For more information about how the acquisition affects Aardvark users, check out the FAQ that we’ve put together….

"We want social search to reach hundreds of millions people around the world, and joining with Google lets us reach that scale — we’re also excited to work with the team at Google: our company has a culture that was inspired by Google in many ways, and we have a lot of respect for the folks who work there," the company says in a blog post.

Aardvark is already available in Google Labs. Users will keep the same Aardvark account. It will continue to work under Google.

The company says it will continue to keep introducing new features, fixing bugs, and improving speed and quality. They say the main thing that is going to change is that they will be able to move faster with the support of Google.

User questions and answers will show up in search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search results if you choose to share them publicly.

Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) thinks Google is coming after its business. Read the company’s comments on that here.