Various reports suggest that Google is on the verge of announcing a $30 million-plus acquisition of Seattle-based startup Wavii, a real-time news service that creates “Facebook-style” news feeds for whatever users happen to be interested in.

Techcrunch first reported the news, citing “legitimate sources” with knowledge of the matter. As part of the deal, Wavii’s small band of employees will apparently be put to work inside Google’s Knowledge Graph team, which is slowly revolutionizing its search algorithms.

Wavii’s, which has slowly evolved over the last four years, three of them while in stealth mode, was apparently highly sought-after, with Apple also competing to buy the firm. It’s technology is the real asset of course – and it combines an interesting mix of Big Data, machine learning, data extraction and natural language processing to support a navigational layer atop of the content it delivers. Wavii works by crawling the ‘real-time web’, scouring news feeds, blogs, videos, tweets and anything else it can get its mitts on the second it comes online, in order to create an up-to-the minute news feed that delivers quick summaries for easy consumption.

Knowledge Graph Just Got Smarter

TechCrunch claims that the team who built Wavii will be lending their skills in information contextualization to help develop its Knowledge Graph, which is a massive database of millions of different ‘entities’ – people, places and things – that tries to understand the relationship between them. Google has used its Knowledge Graph to enhance its search results, providing more facts and direct answers to users queries at the top of its results page. In addition, Google wants to build Knowledge Graph into its other products, including its tablets and smartphones, and its up-and-coming Google Glass device.

In addition, Wavii’s technology should also be able to aid other services too, particularly Google News and Google+, which allows users to keep track of developments in the things they’re most interested in, such as sport teams brands, and people. We can also expect to see Google Now benefit from Wavii as well. Apple was reportedly interested in buying the startup to augment its Siri personal assistant, and Google Now is of course similar to this in many respects – and if anything, it’s probably more aware of important news and stories than its rival.

It’s unclear what will happen to the ‘actual’ Wavii in the meantime. When Yahoo acquired news aggregator Summly for $30 million a few weeks ago, it promptly shut down that service with the intention of building it in to its own products at a later date. For now, both Wavii’s website and iOS app remain online.