Why Apple bought Topsy

In-App Search is coming soon.

I was surprised to hear about Apple buying a Twitter Analytics company. It just didn’t make any sense. One wild possibility I thought is Apple trying to acquire Twitter and this is just a precursor to it. Although possible, I don’t think it is likely.

What does Topsy actually do? Search & Analyze social media data including links. Another possibility is that Apple wants to scan through all those App Store reviews and provide a better search experience for the consumers. This might be true and Apple may use Topsy for that. However, I don’t think a $200M price tag justifies that use case.

Then I remembered how Android is working on in-app search. Apple is also building a bunch of data centers.Could it be that Apple is planning to use Topsy for in-app search?

I really like the universal search on my iPhone and use it all the time to access contacts, apps and emails. What if Apple is building something that indexes the data from the apps the device? On top of it also launch a set of APIs similar to ElasticSearch where app developers can push relevant user data to Apple’s servers to index it?

Apple can keep a version of the index on the device for faster access like it does now and append that data with the results from its servers from other apps.

I don’t know if this is going to happen, but as a user and a developer I am excited to see it happen.