Twitter has acquired real-time search startup Julpan. The founder Ori Allon and his dozen or so co-workers will continue to operate out of New York, but will integrate their search product into Twitter.
As MG Siegler notes, back in 2006 Mr. Allon incited a bidding war between Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, all of whom wanted to own the algorithm he had developed for his PhD thesis. Google triumphed and Mr. Allon worked there for several years on search before leaving to start Julpan.
Twitter recently opened a New York office and the purchase of Julpan will give them a solid base of engineering talent in Silicon Alley.
Mr. Allon announced the news on his blog:
I am very proud to announce that Julpan has been acquired by Twitter.
We founded Julpan more than a year ago. In that time we’ve created innovative, early-alpha-stage search technology that analyzes social activity across the Web to deliver fresh and relevant content to users.
Twitter houses an industry-leading engineering team that is tackling some of the Internet’s most interesting opportunities. With more than 230 million Tweets per day on every subject imaginable, Twitter gives us a chance to make an even greater contribution toward instantly bringing people closer to what is most meaningful to them. We look forward to joining forces with Twitter’s engineering team to explore how we can best integrate and optimize Julpan’s innovations.
I’d like to personally thank the talented engineers, architects and designers of Julpan. I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people with whom to invent some of the world’s best social search technology.
