TheFind, a Mountain View-based shopping search website that “allows shoppers to search hundreds of different sites for particular products at once,” has been acquired and shutdown by Facebook. While neither company disclosed any details about the acquisition deal, the San Jose Mercury News reported that the deal was “less about e-commerce and more about targeting advertisements” for Facebook.
Facebook today announced it has acquired personalized shopping search engine TheFind to help improve its commerce ads. TheFind had raised $26 million from Lightspeed and Redpoint since getting off the ground around 2005, but will now be shut down. Some, but not all, members of the team are joining Facebook. TheFind’s product allowed people to get customized recommendations for products while searching through its massive database of products. A user could enter somewhat generic terms like “black sweater” and then compare prices on black sweaters from a wide array of retailers aggregated by TheFind. They could also discover places to buy their chosen product locally if they want it immediately. Just last month, Facebook launched a special ad unit designed to highlight specific products a merchant is trying to sell. TheFind could help Facebook better match not just a company to a user, but make sure the products shown in the ads are things they’re likely to buy.