Google acquires GIF search engine Tenor

Founded back in early 2014 as Riffsy, Tenor is an online search engine and database for GIFs. Its GIF Keyboard apps is available on Android, iOS, and macOS, serving over 300 million users monthly. According to Tenor, they reached the 1.2 billion search requests earlier this year, and now the time has come for the next big step: joining Google.

In an official blog post that was published yesterday by the company's CEO, David McIntosh, Tenor revealed the fact that Google had just acquired them. He also added that "The acquisition will enable us to accelerate improvements to Tenor’s service for our users, API partners, content partners, and advertisers. Tenor will continue to operate as a separate brand to better serve you."

Those looking for more details about Tenor's future as a part of Google should look no further than the statement belonging to Google Images Director of Engineering, Cathy Edwards, who said about this deal that "Tenor will help us do this more effectively in Google Images as well as other products that use GIFs, like Gboard." 

About a month ago, Tenor announced its partnership with Samsung and became an integrated GIF partner for the Samsung Messages app. However, Tenor is available in quite a few keyboards and messaging apps thanks to the use of an API. This list of apps includes Twitter, Kik, Zynge, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Gboard, and more.

The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, as it usually happens when such deals are being inked.