Yahoo has agreed to buy the French online comparison-shopping service Kelkoo SA for 475 million EUR. Kelkoo is a fast-growing, 250-people strong, profitable company, founded in France in November 1999, with operations today in 9 countries. Kelkoo helps shoppers find what they are looking for, using Web-search technology and collects commissions from merchants for referring these shoppers. Its site is also an interesting opportunity for so-called search-generated listings (e.g. online ads related to what someone is searching for), which Yahoo's Overture unit provides, and further improved by last year's acquisition of Inktomi's search technology.
Expansion of its European revenue and operations are key to Yahoo, and it will also be able to incorporate some of Kelkoo's comparison shopping and product searching technology into its own Yahoo Shopping.
The battle for better commerce-related search services between Yahoo, MSN and Google will continue, as search is often the starting point of an online purchase. Better search leads to more visitors, and this attracts more merchants, who can be asked a higher fee to be included in the search engine.
This interesting battle will continue and it is absolutely not clear who will win it.
Posted by Patrick Van Renterghem at March 27, 2004 04:36 PM