Search engine Google on Thursday announced that it will buy the intellectual property assets of Outride, an online information retrieval technologies developer that was spun off from Xeroxs Palo Alto Research Center.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. In the deal Google will acquire Outrides patent rights, source code, trademarks and associated domain names.
“Outride has made significant advances in the field of relevance technology and we believe Google provides the ideal vehicle to continue the development of these technologies,” said Larry Page, one of Googles co-founders.
Outride, based in Redwood City, Calif., was founded in May 2000 to develop “model-based relevance” technology designed to simplify information searches. Previously known as GroupFire, the company last year reported raising $7 million in private financing from investors that included Ridgewood Capital, Wit SoundView and Xerox. GroupFires founders included former PARC researchers Jim Pitkow, Todd Cass and Hinrich Schuetze.
The Outride deal follows Googles acquisition in February 2001 of Deja.coms Usenet Newsgroup discussion archive business.
Last month, former Novell CEO Eric Schmidt joined Google as its chief executive. Schmidt, who remains chairman of Novell, previously made an investment in Google of an undisclosed amount.