Google has purchased news streaming provider Wavii, the start-up's CEO has confirmed, as it immediately shut down its service before being incorporated into the world's number one web firm.
The deal, worth an estimated $30m (£18m), comes a month after Yahoo bought a similar application, Summly, from a British teenager for a similar amount.
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Based in Seattle, Wavii offered personalised news feeds to users, allowing them to select the subjects they wanted to see and then sourcing tailored content from news articles, Tweets and blogs. Wavii confirmed the deal with a statement from CEO Adrian Aoun on its website.
"You probably know us best for our app that takes the deluge of information streaming across the web and condenses it into fast, fun updates. While we won't continue to offer this particular service, we'll be using our natural language research at Google in ways that may be useful to millions of people around the world."
Wavii could be incorporated into Google smartphones, possibly in a similar way that Yahoo has recently integrated Summly into its iPhone app. Wavii could also be incorporated into Google's own news service to improve search results about stories.
Apple had reportedly been keen to purchase Wavii, with rumours that it wanted to incorporate the technology into its Siri speech recognition voice assistant service.
Wavii provided service both through internet browsers and a mobile application, with close integration with Facebook. This might be expected to change as Google is likely to want to put an emphasis on its Google Plus network.
Founded last year by former Microsoft and Amazon engineers, Wavii had 25 employees, most of whom are expected to relocate to Google's headquarters in California.
