Apple likes to keep acquisitions quiet, often times not announcing anything at all.

Beats Music was Apple's most expensive acquisition in 39 years at $3 billion, toppling the previous acquisition of AuthenTec for $356 million. This shows the small amount of money Apple typically spends on startups compared to competitors like Google and Yahoo.

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Ottocat was another acquisition, but it didn't garner an announcement. In fact, neither Ottocat nor Apple made any arrangements, changes to LinkedIn pages or references to an apparent buyout even though it did happen in late 2013.

The only sign of an acquisition was a patent signed by co-founder of Ottocat Edwin Cooper, who signed off as an Apple employee. The patent was part of the system behind Ottocat, an app search startup capable of digging deeper than Apple's own terms and keywords.

Ottocat offer a new way to find applications based on reviews, sub-categories and tags. It has been used on Apple's Explore category on the App Store and allowd users to find the right app through sub-searches and featured lists.

Considering there are over one million apps on the iOS App Store, these sub-categories are necessary to find apps that may not be popular. Apple's own store team works hard to feature as many apps as possible, but we hear plenty of stories about how developers are unable to make any money or gain popularity on the store due to oversaturation.

Even though the acquisition isn't too interesting on its own, if Edwin and Michelle Cooper are both still at Apple they might be working on Apple's new search engine. It's not clear how many employees moved from Ottocat to Apple.

Apple's new search engine will allow it to work on search in-house, instead of acquiring deals with Microsoft or Yahoo for Safari default search. It would also give Apple another service potentially exclusive to iOS and Mac OS X.

Considering Edwin and Michelle Cooper are serial startup sellers, they might have moved to the next big thing. They tend to sell startups early to companies like Oracle and Apple instead of pushing to keep them independent.

TagsOttocat, Explore, App Store