According to a report from Kara Swisher at Boomtown, Facebook has acquired a company called Chai Labs, though this has yet to be confirmed by either company. Also not confirmed is the price, but it is estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million.
Swisher speculates that the acquisition is more focused on acquiring talent, which would certainly fall in line with past Facebook acquisitions.
"Our Technology platform enables publishers to easily customize and launch scalable, search-friendly sites in several verticals," says Chai Labs. "We seamlessly complement our partners’ editorial teams, and some of our most compelling implementations have occurred when editors and journalists have worked side-by-side with our platform."
"Our semantic search platform uses proprietary crawling, artificial intelligence and data mining technologies to analyze and extract insights from millions of real-time data points across the web," the company explains. "Our goal is to give consumers the most comprehensive, unbiased, up-to-date information they need to make informed and confident purchase decisions. We are laser-focused on simplifying complexity due to over abundance of online sources about a specific topic, leading to information overload. "
Chai Labs was founded by a former Google exec, and counts names like Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, and Joe Kraus of Google Ventures as its investors.
Not only are the Google connections interesting, but so are the search implications that accompany the acquisition.