Twitter has acquired Julpan, a social search company founded by Ori Allon, who is credited with the creation of the Orion Search Engine, and an algorithm Google bought the rights to for use in search refinements. He left Google last year to start Julpan.
An explanation of Julpan on its site says:
Behind our products is a new type of search engine powered by the social web. Our algorithms crunch social activity like status updates, tweets, facebook likes, and rss feeds right as it’s happening to provide you with the freshest relevant content.
In addition to helping us rank content the social and realtime web allows us to understand the context of a query at any given moment. For example, if you searched for “london” during the recent London riots our search engine will automatically adapt and present you with “london riots” results.
Allon has been named Director of Engineering at Twitter. In a note on the Julpan site, he posted the following message:
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.
According to Liz Gannes at All Things D, the Julpan team of 12 is going to Twitter’s New York office.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.