Search Engines that were Acquired, 2016-2018

I compiled a list of some search acquisitions in the past few years.
2016
- Google buys Undecidable Lab –creates tools that can help turn an online search into an actual purchase.
- eBay buys Corrigon — searching and identifying specific objects within an image and matching that with other images or links to products.
- Ctrip buys Skyscanner – flight search engine.
2017
- Amazon buys Graphiq – pulls masses of data from the Web when it’s queried to produce answers in graph form and other visualizations. To help Alexa.
- Pinterest buys Jelly – tried to reimagine search as a social question-and-answer network.
- Apple buys Pop Up Archive – podcast search.
- Chan Zuckerberg buys Meta. – AI technology that indexes, searches and provides full-text access to eighteen thousand journals and literature sources.
- Snapchat buys Vurb – create decks or collections of places to go and things to do and share these decks with friends from a list of contacts on other social media sites
- Baidu buys Raven Tech – voice recognition and search assistant.
- EdCast buys Sociative – highly focused content discovery technology, using topical influencers, personalization and machine learning
- Spotify buys Niland – music search and discovery engine
- Google buys Tenor – Gif search and sharing.
- Elastic buys Swiftype – site search engine.
- Facebook buys Ozlo – conversational AI.
- Appen buys Leapforce – human judgments and labelling.
- Lucidworks buys Twigkit – user experiences for enterprise-grade search and big data applications.
- Elastic buys Prelert – embeds machine learning capabilities into the Elastic Stack for real-time behavioral analytics
- Elastic buys Opbeat – application-level monitoring experience, focusing on the JavaScript ecosystem.
2018
- Samsung buys Kngine – AI search engine startup, dedicated to the idea of making an AI which learns and evolves just like a human does. Improving the next version of its virtual assistant – Bixby.
- Trivago buys TripHappy – artificial intelligence to highlight relevant location and neighborhood information during the hotel search and discovery process.
- Liquidity Services buys Machinio – 8heavy equipment vertical search engine
- Google buys Where is My Train – Tracking 14,000 trains across different India on daily basis.
- Knotel buys 42Floors – search engine for commercial real estate.
- Servicenow buys Friendly Data – natural language query (NLQ) technology enables enterprise customers to build search tools that allow users to ask technical questions even if they don’t know the right jargon.
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