Dipti Gore
Facebook has acquired personalized shopping search engine ,The Find, a nine-year-old company with a search engine that indexes products across thousands of e-commerce sites. Facebook’s acquisition of The Find will help the company to help improve its commerce ads.
Since it was founded in 2005, TheFind had raised $26 million from Lightspeed and Redpoint, but will now be shut down. Some, but not all, members of the team are joining Facebook.
The deal, the value of which is undisclosed, was announced by The Find on its website.
“Key members of our team are joining the company and will be working hard to integrate our technology to make the ads you see on Facebook every day better and more relevant to you,” the company said.
Facebook users see Ads that are more relevant to products they’ve been browsing and buying online. One of The Find’s features is that it attempts to mix online and local stores and says its results are based on “your social profile.”For Facebook, the technology might make the social network a more valuable platform for merchants.
The company says its shopping index contains more than 500 million products from 500,000 stores.
The Find’s own website won’t survive the acquisition.
“Unfortunately, this means we will be taking our search engine offline in the next few weeks,” it said.