Snapchat acquires mobile search engine app, Vurb for $110mn

Snapchat has acquired Vurb, a mobile search engine app for a $110 million and sent Silicon Valley into a tizzy with speculations running wild regarding what Snapchat plans to do with it.

Vurb is a suggestion and recommendation based app that allows users to take multiple actions within the app itself, search, save, and share results with a friend. It uses information such as the location, interests, trends and the results are saved in the form of mobile cards.

It uses Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, Uber, and Google Maps among others to gather data and provide a varying range of results confined within one app.

One of the many speculative assessments about this new acquisition is that it could be used to solve Snapchat users’ persistent issue of difficulty in finding and connecting with new people.

Vurb’s search engine qualities could also be applied to Snapchat’s platform by collecting behavioral patterns and suggesting accounts to follow or making plans with existing friends on Snapchat.

In terms of monetary benefits for Snapchat from this new acquisition, gathered data could be more than helpful for the company to apply and target users’ with advertisements on their platform.

After Instagram Stories, essentially a clone of Snapchat’s exclusive ephemeral feature, was launched earlier this month, Snapchat is being forced to innovate in a bid to stay relevant in the cutthroat market of photo sharing platforms.