SiliconBeat has an unconfirmed rumor:Google is in talks to buy Olive Software, of Santa Clara, for between $70 and $80 million.
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.
Olive can also transform newspapers to an XML repository from various information resources – PDF, microfilm, and paper-based. The XML structure defines the publication's information components, such as articles, photos, and ads.
Olive technology might be used for Google Books, Google News (you'll actually see the newspapers, not just their online version), Google Search Appliance or Google AdSense for Print. Olive has many things in common with Google: it was founded in 1999, it's Santa Clara-based and it's the world leader in XML automation technologies.
You can try Olive Software here.
