It’s recently been announced that in an interesting acquisition Google has now acquired Apture.
Apture is a great service which I use on most of my blogs, which provides “instantaneous access to information with its award-winning in-page search technology. Its products let readers immediately find and browse the best content from across the web – in one window”.
With customers including the New York Times, Financial Times & Reader’s Digest they have built a useful and widely used tool, this however will change on December 20th as they plan to discontinue all services and products.
It seems this is purely a talent acquisition for Google as they have stated that “we think now is the best time to expand our efforts by joining Google’s Chrome team to help build the next generation user experience directly into the web.”
I look forward to seeing how Google try to incorporate the concepts the Apture team have developed and how this will be integrated with Google’s Chrome Browser. It does however seem a great shame that Google doesn’t appear to be continuing the maintenance of the existing Apture services as this will be quite a decrement to some bloggers and site owners who use the service to help improve the readers experience.