Google May Buy Olive Software

This is the 'rumour' that SiliconBeat published and was later picked up by Aaron Wall of Threadwatch. The rumour has it that Google is looking to pay between $70 and $80 million to buy Olive Software.

Olive, which is backed with about $21 million in venture capital from Sequoia Capital and Pitango, makes a company’s data files accessible from the Web. So you can see why Google might want to promote this technology: By crawling even more data, it can provide better search results.

Olive converts PDF documents, microfilm and any other files to XML, a format which can be used with any database, Web browser, or application that supports it. At the same time, Olive preserves the document's content, structure and layout.

According to Aaron, "Many traditional publishing companies are too lazy or shortsighted to see the value of the web. They are also afraid of losing their ad dollars. Many web advertisers are too cheap / thrifty to do much magazine advertising. The average page of web content is likely of far lower quality than the average newspaper or magazine article.

What if Google found a way to bridge the gap? What if they had almost all published information in a large XML database?"

If the deal falls in place then Google might as well redefine interactive medium.

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