Snap.com to Take Stake in GlobalBrain.net

San Francisco-based Snap.com, an Internet portal owned by NBC and CNet, will buy into a New Zealand firm and receive a limited exclusive licensing agreement for its customization and search technology, the companies will announce today.

Snap.com will use the technology from GlobalBrain.net to develop Internet portal services that will serve a variety of affinity groups, demographic sets and geographical regions.

The companies said GlobalBrain’s technology will allow for improved search results by watching the keywords that users put into search engines and how they respond to the results. The more people use the search engine, the more it learns about how they search and what kinds of results they want, the companies said.

The technology can be particularly effective in settings that appeal to specific users, they said. People who frequent, say, a site about gardening might be looking for different information from those who frequent children’s sites seek when searching with the term “spider.” GlobalBrain’s technology, the companies said, will allow a search engine to understand and account for those differences.