Blekko Inc., the curated search engine, has been quiet over the last two years. Until Friday, the company hadn’t tweeted since December 2013 and there hasn’t been much more activity on its Facebook page over that time either. On Friday, the company updated its website to state that “The blekko technology and team have joined IBM Watson!”

The page redirects to an announcement on IBM’s Smarter Planet blog that states that IBM has acquired “certain technology” from Blekko Inc. Technology that, according to IBM’s post, “will provide access to additional content that can be infused in Watson-based products and services delivered by IBM and its partners.”

Founder and CEO Rich Skrenta publicly announced his project in 2008, claiming to offer a search engine with “algorithmic editorial differentiation” rather than merely indexing the web. The company’s web search engine eventually launched in 2010 and competed with the likes of Microsoft’s Bing, Google, as well as DuchDuckGo. Blekko later partnered with DuckDuckGo.

Neither company has disclosed the terms of the deal nor revealed exactly what technology IBM has acquired.

According to IBM, the Blekko deal adds advanced Web-crawling capabilities as well as categorization and intelligent filtering technology to the IBM Watson stable. The technology is meant to compliment the recent acquisition of deep learning startup AlachemyAPI and other Watson Developer Cloud technologies.

In an effort to explain how the Blekko technology fits in with IBM’s cognitive computing model, Big Blue employed an interesting parable using Big Oil’s supply chain:

“A metaphor to understand how this works is to think about the information on the Internet and other sources as a vast underground oil field. Blekko’s technologies are like oil exploration and production teams that locate the high-quality oil, drill, and deliver it to the refinery. AlchemyAPI’s technologies, together with Watson’s existing capabilities, are like the refineries that refine the oil into a multitude of finished products, such as gasoline, heating oil or jet fuel. IBM and its partners then distribute insights to the points of impact, the way tanker trucks deliver fuel to gas stations or depots.”

Blekko, established in 2007, raised $60.2 million over nine investment rounds.  Investors include Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway, as well as CMEA Capital, PivotNorth Capital, and U.S. Venture Partners.

Screenshot: SiliconANGLE via blekko.com