Facebook Acquires Personalized Shopping Search Engine, TheFind

Facebook has acquired personalized shopping search engine TheFind, illustrating the social network’s growing expansions in e-commerce and search. TheFind was founded in 2006 and had previously raised $26 million in three investment funds, and the company has announced that it will be shutting down its service in the next few weeks to combine forces with Facebook.

The shopping search engine has an index of 500 million products across 500,000 stores. Its technology personalizes the shopping experience for signed-in users, who have the option to tie in their Facebook accounts to tailor their experience based on Facebook “likes.” Additionally, TheFind has a product ranking engine that identifies popular products and stores for each search.

This computing power will now be used to serve Facebook ads that are more relevant to the user.

“We’re excited to welcome TheFind to Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “TheFind’s talented team has built a successful search engine that connects people to products. Together, we believe we can make the Facebook ads experience even more relevant and better for consumers. Our business is about connecting people with the topics, companies, brands and increasingly products they care about and we look forward to doing that with TheFind on board.”

Facebook has been working on e-commerce strategies in recent times, such as its testing of a Buy Button since last July. However, not much has been said publicly about this initiative since the testing started. The company’s forays into e-commerce have been problematic, with the much-publicized launch of Facebook Gifts proving to fail, as the product was subsequently shut down last year. Now, with its acquisition of TheFind, Facebook would be able to add additional shopping tools to its service, which could help the company to significantly expand its e-commerce offerings. This technology could make Facebook a much more valuable platform for merchants.

With its acquisition of TheFind, Facebook will be able to serve ads to users that are more relevant to the products that they’ve been browsing and buying online, and could also highlight local retailers. One of the features of TheFind is that it mixes online and local stores, and the company explains that its results are based on “your social profile.” For marketers, this technology could make Facebook a much more valuable platform for reaching consumers effectively and generating e-commerce sales directly from the social network. Surely, Facebook’s ad products could increase in popularity if the technology is utilized well.

In its announcement, TheFind explained that key members of its team will be joining Facebook to integrate its technology into the delivery of ads on the social network. Further details of the acquisition, including the price of the deal, have not been revealed.

Will the integration of TheFind’s technology help Facebook to succeed with a Buy Button? Will Facebook become a major e-commerce platform? We’ll be watching to see how the company utilizes this acquisition in the coming period.