Twitter Buys Julpan To Boost Content Discovery

Twitter has acquired Julpan, a small start-up search service in New York that had focused on analyzing social activity in order to improve search results. Twitter says the acquisition will be used to boost its ability to help users discover interesting content.

“We’re looking at how to best surface content to users based on their interest graph,” said Mike Abbott, Twitter’s vice president of engineering, about the purchase.

Last month, Twitter rolled out a new “Activity” tab designed to help people more easily spot interesting content, part of an overall move to highlight interesting material to Twitter users.

Exactly how Julpan’s technology will be used to further that mission remains to be determined, Abbott said. But the technology will be integrated in various ways, and what Julpan had offered on its own site isn’t necessarily what might eventually appear within Twitter.

Julpan CEO Ori Allon had previously worked at Google, having been hired for his Orion search refinement technology. He left in 2010. Several others from the 12 person Julpan team, which Twitter says will remain in New York, also came from Google.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.