Answers.com, the online reference site, has bought out natural language search engine and technology company Brainboost, in a cash and stock deal worth up to $10 million.

The company will pay $4 million in cash and 439,000 restricted shares, in a deal worth about $9 million-$10 million at current stock prices.

Answers will meld Brainboost’s answer-extraction technology into its own search system, which allows consumers to seek answers to questions from a database of 1.5 million topics in encyclopedias and other authoritative sources.

Assaf Rozenblatt, 26, the New York-based principal of Brainboost, will join Answers as head of natural language processing technology at its research group in Israel.

Some good info on the underlying technologies for the two sites and how they would work togther is avilable on this FAQ page.

More info in the release here.