Yammer received another round of investment on Tuesday. This time $17 million from a Facebook-backed fund.

The fund is led by Social+Capital Partnership, established by former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya. Facebook is an investor in the fund.

Also participating in the Yammer investment were current investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital and U.S. Venture Partners. Yammer raised $25 million in a C round last November. In total, it has raised $59 million.

Yammer is as close as you get to a to a consumer service in the world of the enterprise. Like many of the new enterprise services, its architecture is what sets it apart. It’s streamlined, designed to serve data very quickly and efficiently with relevance and the capability to provide real-time knowledge for the customer. In other words, search is core to Yammer’s mission.

In May, DZone did an interview with Boris Aleksandrovsky, a search architect at Yammer. According to DZone, Aleksandrovsky specializes in search, machine learning, data analysis, and neuroscience. He helped implement the real-time search system in the Yammer offering.

Aleksandrovsky’s explanations show clearly why the Yammer service would appeal to a former Facebook executive and the social network giant itself. Yammer has search basked in a number of ways. It is similar to Twitter in the way results are presented. But the Yammer search architecture makes it also much like Facebook.

Like Facebook, Yammer organizes data according to the relevance to the person creating the content and the individual doing the search. The service triggers data that you have a tendency to want to see, such as updates from the CEO or a major issue affecting the company.

Yammer also performs searches that resemble Google. From DZone:

There are however other types of content that are much more knowledge heavy and with the retrieval of each textual similarity, reputation and potential for engagement are more important then timeliness. For instance when the sales representative is searching for a relevant approach to a particular client industry, then he would be interested in the experiences of all other sales people who tried to sell to that industry, and he would want to look back as far as the records go. This is a case where Yammer’s search system is trying to act more like Google search system.

Services Angle

I once was a Yammer skeptic. But over the past two years, the company has clearly shown that its technology is of first-rank. Look at awesome apps and you see a common underlying theme. Search is a top priority. For Yammer, that’s certainly true and reason enough for a funding event to take interest from the likes of Facebook.