Pinterest has just acquired Jelly, the startup owned by Biz Stone and Ben Finkel. Jelly is practically a search engine-type technology that relies on people instead of Google for hard-to-answer questions. What this search engine does is that it re-routes questions to people who have high chances of knowing the answers.
Pinterest on the other hand, is also a type of Google-alternative for people looking for actual answers. Most of the time, if you Google queries like "dresses" or "skirts", you'll end up with several ad-based articles that were formatted to look like the answers you're looking for. Pinterest offers a more accurate set of results, which made it the popular image platform that it currently is.
These two companies' combined forces are aimed to build the "world's first visual engine". Nevertheless, it's still hard to figure out how Pinterest is going to make use of Jelly to achieve this goal. The Verge, on one hand, describes Jelly as disastrous, and questions how the company will help Pinterest in its "visual discovery engine" goals. Pinterest on the other hand, seems to be positive with its decision.
Jelly's Finkel will be part of the new team full time and Stone will join in as a Special Advisor. Neither of the companies have revealed the financial details of the acquisition. As per Tech Crunch's report, Stone shared the details about the deal but he said that they are not sharing numbers. Stone said that Pinterest has shown interest in the large part of Jelly's "tiny team". This is why both he and Stone are taken as part of the acquisition deal.
Nevertheless, there are still things that both companies haven't resolved yet. Stone said that they are still working out the details and that there are still a lot of things that are unknown. This includes the relationship status of Pinterest and Jelly, whether or not they will be separated or integrated. Needless to say, Stone said in a blog post that Jelly is enthusiastic and certain that this acquisition is the best decision for the human-powered search engine technology.
