Via PaidContent, news that Reuters is to acquire text analytics company Clearforest, part of creating a new strategic group around search. Leading that group is Gerry Campbell, the former long-time head of AOL’s search efforts:

As part of its drive into this space, it has created a new strategic group within Reuters and appointed former head of search for AOL, Gerry Campbell, who will oversee the integration of ClearForest and drive this innovation.

PaidContent made references to Clearforest having been working with Reuters to "boost search rankings for its business stories." To be clear, I don’t think that Clearforest has been providing external SEO-style ranking support. Instead, the Clearforest tools seem designed for those who want to make content within a web site (or a particular database) more easily found by visitors.

Reuters is also launching a new tool designed to scan for market data. Reuters introduces machine-readable sentiment scan; acquires ClearForest from Finextra covers this more.

Campbell — who was senior VP and general manager of AOL Search — joined Reuters in late 2006, according to his verified ZoomInfo profile. That was a quiet move I don’t recall reading about. He turns up more publicly at a new company coincidentally the same day similar high-ranking Yahoo search vice president has turned up elsewhere. Our post Yahoo Search VP Andrew Braccia Resigns, has more on that.

Related Topics: AOL: General | Business Issues: Acquisitions & Investments | Search Engines: Other Search Engines | Site & Enterprise Search

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan