A Complete List of Google's Acquisitions

I have been spending this lazy Sunday afternoon organizing/planning/catching up at the office. Exciting things are happening at Clearspring as we continue to expand our team of renegade ninjas to build out our platform. We are pretty excited about what we are doing and, hopefully, you will enjoy the fruits of our labor come release. If you are interested in keeping posted on our progress, please sign up for our newsletter (coming soon) on our website. Also stay tuned to this blog, as I will have more to come on Clearspring soon.

In addition to doing fun work stuff, I have taken it upon myself to spend some serious time web surfing. I have not had the chance to do that in a long time and am WAY overdue. As I caught up with recent happenings, such as the Measuremap acquisition by Google, I noticed a couple other Google acquisitions that I had missed in my first sweep. I combined these findings with my previous research to create a fairly comprehensive list of their acquisitions over the last several years. In general, it seems that the boys at Google have tended to favor smaller players with the following competencies: search, advertising, web analytics, mapping, mobile services, and online publishing.

1. Outride - Information Retrieval/Search - 2001
2. Deja News - Groups - 2001
3. Applied Semantics - Contextual Advertising - 4/2003
4. Pyra Labs - Blogging - 9/2003
5. Kaltix - Personalized Search - 9/2003
6. Sprinks - Advertising - 10/2003
7. Ignite Logic - 5/2004
   
8. Picasa - Photo Organizer - 7/2004
9. Keyhole - Mapping - 10/2004
10. Where 2 - Mapping - 2004
11. Zipdash - Mobile Service - 2004
12. Urchin - Web Analytics - 3/2005
13. Dodgeball - Mobile Service - 5/2005
14. Akwan - Information Retrieval/Querying - 7/2005
15. Android - Mobile Services - 2005
    
16. dMarc- Radio Advertising - 1/2006
17. Measure Map - Web Analytics - 2/2006
    

Their acquisitions have been fairly consistent with their mission and corresponding monetization strategy. Specifically their acquisitions to date have increased their ability to organize/provide access to more information while bolstering their distribution channels, ability to place and sell advertisements, and ability to analyze the web traffic driving both processes. The only acquisition that I am a bit in the dark about is Ignite Logic. From what I can gather, the company never managed to raise any real money and had a web-template solution targeted towards law firms. Not exactly earth-shattering - right? Battelle had some interesting thoughts on this a while back, but I am still not sure about this one.

If anyone spots something that I missed, or stated incorrectly, please let me know. Enjoy, Fan-boys. Happy Sunday.

technorati tags: google, acquisition, web