Twitter Acquires Summize; Launches Official Twitter Search

by Jarrett Martineau | July 15, 2008 at 08:38 am

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Twitter is having problems on a regular basis... kinda feels like one are cut off from the world

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As NowPublic speculated last week, Twitter has been getting set to purchase Summize, a search tool built on the Twitter API.

Today, it was announced that the acquisition has been made official -- and Twitter simultaneously launched its own search engine at search.twitter.com with an admittedly catchy tag line: "See what the world is doing — right now."

Twitter has announced that it has acquired Summize, and simultaneously launched its own search engine at search.twitter.com. The new search tool has the exact same look, feel, and functionality of Summize, but with Twitter branding.

We’ve followed Summize closely at Mashable, first reporting news of the company’s re-launch as a Twitter search engine back in April. Since then, Summize has added impressive features like local search, while also hinting at its distribution plans in inking a deal with the Huffington post.

The team behind Summize will be staying on, with all 5 engineers joining Twitter, according to a blog post by Evan Williams. Additionally, Williams says that Summize’s API will be combined with Twitter’s and “integrated under the Twitter brand.”

It should be noted that Summize was not the first mover in the Twitter search space and was preceded by projects like Tweetscan. But eventually they did it best and offered the most commercially viable product, and hence, to the victor go the spoils.