AOL Goes on Early Christmas Shopping, Buys Yedda For AOL, Christmas shopping starts as early as November. Exactly six days after acquiring Quigo, an advertising company, AOL announced that it has acquired semantic social search question and answer service, Yedda. In an undisclosed amount and without much hype, AOL expands its internet property with Yedda becoming its wholly owned subsidiary.
So, what is Yedda and what’s in the buyout for AOL? The official press release says,
“Using Yedda’s technology, AOLwill incorporate the Questions and Answer functionality into select programming areas on AOL.com and will further integrate “Questions & Answers” into its experiences in the coming month”
Yedda’s patent-pending technology automatically matches questions to other related questions and topics while selecting the best available users to answer the questions. The technology is similar to other people-powered, sematic search engine that has been proliferating the web search market. Yedda’s semantic matching technology direct questions to relevant communities of Internet users who can offer their expertise thereby starting a community-wide dialogue of invited people who will discuss the topic. To put it simply, Yedda is a people-powered search
engine in the likes of Hakia, iRazoo among other semantic search engines.
Ron Grant, President and COO of AOL says the acquisition will bring AOL’s traditional search resources and an entire community of people to help users quickly find answers to question. “In the course of our daily lives we often leverage the experience and expertise of friends, colleagues and professionals like doctors and lawyers to get answers to questions we have,” says Grant.
For its part Yedda CEO and Co-founder Avichay Nissenbaum said that the services and technologies that the Yedda team has developed will fit perfectly with AOL’s strategy.
“We will continue to empower knowledge communities throughout the Web, directly and through our network of partnerships, and we’re looking forward to weaving our unique value into the various AOL properties,” says Nissenbaum.
It looks like AOL is slowly building up its web infrastructure and preparing for someting big in the future. With two acquisitions in a row, makes me to start believing that Google maybe should pay close attention to what AOL is really up to.
