Social media monitoring company Meltwater Group has acquired IceRocket, a realtime social search engine. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
IceRocket is a real-time search engine that crawls over 200 million blogs, as well as Tweets, news, and videos that are each profiled, categorized and ranked for results. The company also operates a blog search engine that identifies trends, influencers, shared links and popular topics.
Meltwater says IceRocket will continue to operate as a standalone search engine while its technology will be integrated with the Meltwater Buzz social media monitoring product. The company says it will use IceRocket’s technology and talent to build internal data acquisition team to harvest and analyze content.
Meltwater offers a number of social media and news monitoring applications to business users. The company says it is now seeing $100 million in revenue per year, and serves more than 20,000 customers.
IceRocket is an interesting acquisition considering the current state of realtime search engines. Many, including OneRiot and Collecta, were forced to shut their realtime search products down recently.
Back in 2006, IceRocket was supposedly being acquired by the Think Partnership, which was then called off. And the company is backed by Mark Cuban.
In addition to IceRocket, Meltwater recently acquired social CRM company JitterJam in March 2011 and BuzzGain last year. The company says it plans to acquire more businesses and technologies in the near future.