Q&A provider Yedda is 2nd AOL buy in a week

By Steven Scheer

JERUSALEM, Nov 12 (Reuters) - AOL said on Monday it has acquired Yedda Inc, an online provider of questions and answers, in a continued push to become more competitive with Google Inc (GOOG.O) and Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O).

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Yedda, based in Delaware with its R&D operations in Israel, will function as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc (TWX.N). The move comes less than a week after AOL said it would buy Internet advertising technology company Quigo.

A source said AOL, which has begun a restructuring, paid about $340 million for Quigo, which also has its research and development centre in Israel.

Yedda, which started business in February 2006, has 20 employees.

Like Google and Yahoo, Yedda allows users to search for information. But with Yedda, users enter a question on a specific topic and it searches for people with experience in that area.

"In the course of our daily lives we often leverage the experience and expertise of friends, colleagues and professionals like doctors and lawyers to get answers to questions we have," Ron Grant, president and chief operating officer of AOL, said in the statement.

"Incorporating Yedda's unique technology into AOL enables us to bring together our traditional search resources and an entire community of people to help users quickly find answers to questions."

AOL noted that it would incorporate Yedda's Q&A functionality into select programming areas on AOL.com.

Yedda co-founder and Chief Executive Avichay Nissenbaum said receiving answers to questions could take minutes to hours since it searches for only relevant and qualified people and then creates a personalised Web page.

"It's about connecting people and benefitting from people's experiences rather than sifting through large amounts of content and reading a lot of articles to get an answer to your question," Nissenbaum told Reuters.

Nissenbaum said Yedda will next forge strategic partnerships with publishers, Web sites and media companies to promote "knowledge communities."

"We believe that social knowledge search and interaction ... is definitely a great interest of people to connect through the internet to other people with similar interests," he said.