Two years after acquiring Topsy Labs for $200 million, Apple has decided to shut down the analytics company. As usual, we have no official information on what the company’s talent or technology is being used for, or why the company chose to shut down its services after all this time. However, the company specialized in searching through massive amounts of data on social media, and seeing as how iOS has had some noticeable improvements to its searching abilities in the years following the acquisition, it’s safe to assume the company’s talent was involved.
Almost two years ago to date, Apple acquired a Topsy Labs, an analytics company that made various products that searched and drew data from conversations happening on services like Twitter. Now, Apple has shut down the service according to a tweet from Topsy. “We’ve searched our last tweet,” Topsy said in a post on Twitter this evening. Going to Topsy’s website now redirects you to an Apple support article on how to use Search on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. The company was tweeting often until November 20th, 2013, after which tweets stopped entirely until today’s final post. Apple has yet to acknowledge what specifically it used Topsy’s technology and talent for, but there are several instances of improved and deeper search throughout iOS. For instance, iOS 9 introduced new, deeper “Proactive” search that leverages Siri, Contacts, Calendar, Passbook, and third-party apps to create deeper search functionality throughout the operating system.
