AOL Buys Contextual Search Company Sphere

Boston (dbTechno) – Time Warner Inc’s AOL has purchased the contextual display company Sphere. This comes just one month after AOL announced that they have acquired one of the most popular social networking sites in Europe, Bebo, for $850 million in cash.

The deal between AOL and Sphere is believed to be around $25 million.

Sphere was founded in 2005 as a blog search engine. It also developed Web technology which took articles, videos, blogs, etc. It takes this content and then shows contextual results via a widget. Publishers can add related articles, blog posts and other content from the Web to enhance the content.

Over 50,000 Web sites run off of the technology from Sphere. These sites include major media organizations such as CNN, Reuters, and others.

AOL President Ron Grant put out a statement saying “Our focus at AOL is providing consumers relevant content wherever they are on the Web, and Sphere’s capabilities fit in perfectly with this effort. Not only will it let us enhance content on our own sites, it will let us distribute our content across Sphere’s growing third-party publisher network.”

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