Yahoo has acquired Zofari, which offers a local search and discovery app of the same name. It first launched in 2012.
Zofari announced the acquisition on its website (via TechCrunch), where it says:
Since our very first alpha in 2012, our goal has been to deliver brilliant local recommendations in the fastest way possible, and essentially, make the world an easier place to explore. Inspired by what Pandora has done for music and Netflix has done for movies, we built (what we think) is a beautiful and powerful recommendation app that allows users to discover new places based on the restaurants, bars and cafes they know and love.
Along the way, we’ve also created some cool contextualization technology that enables us to look at a place and extract granular information about it, transforming bland, vanilla attributes like ratings and dollar signs into the familiar ideas that people use to make real-world decisions.
While we’ve built an experience we couldn’t be more proud of, we’re a small company and have always dreamed of reaching users at a greater scale. After meeting some of the amazing folks on the Yahoo Search team and hearing about their vision, the decision for our team to join Yahoo was an easy one. We can’t talk about what we’re working on yet but needless to say we are very, very excited.
The local search and discovery space is an increasingly crowded one, so Zofari is probably better off with an established brand like Yahoo as the other big search engines, and dedicated services like Yelp and Foursquare battle it out.
The Zofari apps for iPhone and Android are still available.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Image via Zofari