Yahoo Acquires Email Search Developer Stata Labs
Yahoo announced on Thursday it has acquired privately held e-mail search company Stata Labs, opening up a new email and attachment file search market for Yahoo Search Technology and Overture Search Advertising. Stata Labs is the company behind its flagship software product Bloomba, which allows users to search e-mail and attachments in their in-boxes and to share schedules, taking aim at Microsoft Corp’s Outlook.
Yahoo does not plan to continue to offer Bloomba or its spam filter SAproxy Pro, the acquisition however will provide Yahoo with “technological expertise and strategic assets,” according to Stata’s Web site. At press time Yahoo does not have any announcements about the ongoing plans for the technology or the specifics of the transaction.
A Yahoo spokeswoman said the acquisition closed on Wednesday and would not disclose the purchase price. Yahoo is not the only search driven web entity to dive into email. Microsoft recently bought LookOut for its neat little Outlook email search utility which seems to be something Microsoft would be incorporating into the next versions of MS Outlook. Google also is beta testing GMail, its search driven and keyword advertising funded web mail product.
Google is experimenting with Gmail to add all finds of flavors. They are currently testing mail-forwarding facility in GMail, which is reportedly free during testing. A clear indication that many of the future services (POP/IMAP support) would come at a price. Also, an Atom RSS feed link was visible for sometime in the GMail interface which is now surprisingly gone, pointing towards a possibility of checking GMail from mail aggregators.
Given Yahoo’s commitment to integrating new technologies such as RSS and News Parsing into their search marketing mix, I wouldn’t doubt that they haven’t looked into integrating such tools into an email search functionality.
