According to a The Wall Street Journal report yesterday, Apple has bought Topsy, a search engine and analytics firm for over $200m. But the big question is why is Apple buying a small twitter search company? The obvious answer here is Ads…. ads….ads — Yes, this can be used to better target ads, to inform users of its products about popular subjects, or to generally tap into of-the-moment interests.
Topsy is a ticking Gold mine
Apple’s acquisition is of Topsy is no accident, this company knows a gold mine when it sees one — as Topsy recently launched a search engine for tweets that it said was capable of searching through the over 350 billion sent since Twitter first launched. Its amazing how even Twitter itself doesn’t provide such a solution as it has also been relying on Topsy’s data to capture such data.
According to Apple’s official statement, all they said was that “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” We all know Apple wants to enter the search business and this could be Apple’s way into this bottomless pit of demand for search data to compete with the likes of Google.
