Oracle Corp. is beefing up its search capabilities.

This past week, the company announced that it has bought some of the assets of New York-based TripleHop Technologies Inc., a maker of information search, retrieval and classification software. The technology Oracle acquired, MatchPoint, combines both semantic and statistical analysis to improve the recall and precision capabilities of user queries, as well as the ability to put the information into context.

In a letter to customers posted on Oracle"s Web site Tuesday, Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of database server technologies, explained that the TripleHop MatchPoint technology would be incorporated into the Oracle stack.

Members of the development team of TripleHop would be joining Oracle as well. "As organizations deal with more and more information, we believe that search is a key technology not only for higher productivity but also for making better decisions," he said.

For TripleHop MatchPoint customers, service and support will remain the same, he stated. "Our primary goal is 100 percent customer satisfaction," Mendelsohn said. "We will continue to offer service for the TripleHop MatchPoint product."

He said that a road map would be provided as the merger of the technologies proceeds, along with any proposed migration strategy.

Details of the price and other terms of the acquisition weren"t immediately forthcoming.