• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 2, 2011

Further streamlining its assets, AOL just unloaded its Sphere content recommendation engine onto rival recommendation engine Outbrain. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"It's not every day that a start-up buys a company from a BigCo," Yaron Galai, co-founder and CEO of Outbrain, boasted. "It's usually the other way around!"

Outbrain is hoping the additional technology -- which will now be known as Surphace -- can broaden its reach among online publishers, and improve its service offerings.

Per the deal, publishers now using the Outbrain platform include Lonely Planet, Los Angeles Times, Billboard, WordPress.com, The Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD blog network, and AOL itself.

Existing publishing partners includes USA Today, Ziff Davis, iVillage, Slate, The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast and Newsweek.

Surphace CEO Josh Guttman will be joining the Outbrain team as senior vice president and will head Outbrain's strategic platform integrations.

Outbrain provides online publishers with a platform for recommending content links with the hope of increasing traffic and page views. The Outbrain service also endeavors to help publishers better monetize their content pages by leveraging recommended links to third-party content.

Founded in 2006, Outbrain is backed by Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israeli Fund, GlenRock, Rhodium, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Funded by True Ventures, Trident Capital and Hearst, Sphere founder Tony Conrad sold out to AOL in 2008 for a reported $25 million.

A serial entrepreneur, Conrad just recently sold another company -- personal profile network About.me -- to AOL. About.me lets anyone quickly build a personal "splash page," including a profile, email address, and links to online channels from Facebook and LinkedIn to Flickr and Twitter.