Reuters Buys Search Mining Tech; Former AOL Search Chief Campbell To Lead New Search Group

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.