NEW YORK (AP) – Internet search company Yahoo Inc. has purchased news-aggregation Web site BuzzTracker in a sale that closed earlier in the week, BuzzTracker Chief Executive Alan Warms said Friday.
The purchase price is not being disclosed, Warms said in a telephone interview.
The sale closed on Tuesday, he said, and under the deal Yahoo acquired substantially all the assets of Chicago-based Participate Media, of which BuzzTracker is the sole product. Warms is the founder and CEO of Participate.
Warms said he will become the vice president and general manager of Yahoo News and his team will now work for Yahoo.
BuzzTracker tracks 110,000 content sources online — which include blogs and mainstream media — and uses an algorithm to sort them by importance, which the site then presents in various topical feeds.
Details of how BuzzTracker will be integrated with Yahoo are still being hammered out, Warms said, but he's not expecting any “drastic changes” to Yahoo News.
In a phone interview Friday, senior vice president of Yahoo News and information, Scott Moore, said BuzzTracker's technology will augment Yahoo News.
“Say there's a plane crash in Argentina — some remote thing that all of a sudden happens — we can use BuzzTracker to create an index of everything around that topic that is happening, almost instantly,” Moore said.
BuzzTracker is the Sunnyvale, Calif., company 's second acquisition in two weeks. On Sept. 4, Yahoo said it will pay $300 million for direct marketing network BlueLithium.
Yahoo shares added $1.01, or 4.3 percent, to finish Friday's session at $24.73 and remains unchanged in after-hours trading.
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