Federated Media, a leading advertising network, is buying assets of TextDigger, a five-year-old semantic search company, specializing in vertical search as well as the automated tagging and organization of content. Terms were not disclosed.
The acquisition, announced early Monday, is part of Federated Media's plans to expand its technology platform to provide more tools and services to its couple hundred publisher customers. Recently, FM hired Chief Product Officer, Amy Yeh, to head up a growing technology team and platform roadmap.
"We're going to be able to accelerate traffic to [FM's network] by showing related content so that eyeballs don't leave [the publisher's] site," said Tim Musgrove, CEO and founder of TextDigger, in an interview with me. Tim will begin working at FM as Chief Scientist, but will also remain affiliated at TextDigger as the Senior Research Fellow.
As part of this deal, TextDigger, which raised a total of $5.8 million in venture financing, from True Ventures, Intel Capital, CBS Interactive and angel investors, will remain a stand-alone company and will go back to its roots of improving vertical search for publishers, such as Fark, Red Orbit and PC World.
TextDigger will also be able to help FM improve the relevancy of its ads that it displays on its network, by leveraging TextDigger's semantic technology. Additionally, FM will have the ability to re-sell TextDigger's SEO (search engine optimization) services, which helps publishers improve their SEO rankings.
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TextDigger is a San Jose, CA-based startup developing advanced semantic solutions for the Web, including hosted semantic search, automated content tagging and topic generation, and optimized keyword generation. These products make Web pages more findable, both to outside search engines such as Google and to other pages within the same site via cross-linking and related search. The result is increased revenue from higher inbound traffic and longer sessions. TextDigger was founded by a group of former CNET employees and executives who developed patented linguistic technologies that, today, are used to enhance the content on thousands of pages within CNET's award winning websites.
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