Google Acquires Australian Technology

Google Acquires Australian Technology – Google Inc. has acquired Orion search engine technology from an Australian university, which the institution described last year as potentially revolutionary, according to the IDG News Service.

Google has also reportedly hired the PhD student who developed the technology.

The Orion acquisition and Allon’s hiring happened “months ago,” the spokesman wrote. Still, news about this issue began to surface in recent days, starting with reports from media outlets in Australia and Israel, the student’s native country, IDG recently reported.

In a press release issued last September, the University of New South Wales in Sydney called “Orion” a “complement to queries run on search engines such as those from Google, Yahoo Inc., and BING.”

Orion provides an expanded text excerpt from the list of results, so users don’t have to click over to those pages to see the information relevant to their query, according to the university, the release said.

It also displays results that are topically related to the keywords the user entered, even if those keywords are not found on those linked pages., “Thus, it offers an expert search without requiring an expert’s knowledge,” according to the statement.

The functionality, as described, seems to resemble a feature that other search engines already offer by suggesting alternative queries to refine search results.

For example, when users run a query on IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com, they get a conventional list of results. Still, they also receive a list of suggestions for narrowing and expanding the query’s thematic scope. They also get a list of keywords that are potentially related to the query.

Through such features, search engines aim to address the problem of queries that return hundreds of thousands and even millions of results, forcing users to wade through many Web pages to find the information they are seeking.

Search engine operators recognize that their engines need to move away from the model of providing long lists of search results, and instead aim to provide the specific facts users want, say industry analysts.

To varying degrees, most major search engines now sometimes deliver a summary of information collated from various online sources, particularly for queries related to weather, movies, famous people, and geographical locations.

# Google Acquires Australian Technology