The leader in social networking world Facebook Inc. (FB, Financial) has added yet another feather to its cap by acquiring search engine TheFind. By this acquisition, Facebook intends to bring in traffic by offering personalized advertising offered by TheFind. The service commencement has not been officially announced yet.
What TheFind offers
Founded in 2006 by Siva Kumar, headquartered in California, TheFind aims to become a shopping search engine, used for comparing prices. It claims to have a search database of over 500 million products from over 500,000 stores and online sellers. The database is created by both crawling and dealer feeds. A ranking system is given to the products based on pricing, relevance and popularity. By clicking on the product from the search engine page, a user is redirected to dealerâs website from where the product can be purchased directly. Recently, TheFind introduced new features like âcolour searchâ and âfind similar itemsâ.
TheFind was running successfully with strong partnerships with PayPal (PYPL, Financial) and Glam publishers Network, and acquired womenâs shopping website Glimpse.com in 2007. It claims to be the second largest search engine with more than 200 million visitors per months of May 2010. TheFind had also been an active charitable campaign runner and contributed $10,000 for the charity âDoctors without borderâ through its colour campaign in 2007.
TheFind also increased their websiteâs reach by introducing features like mini-malls, virtual shopping districts and local search capability. IN 2007, TheFind was nominated for Webby awards in the best retail category. The site has been quite impressively providing price comparisons among top sellers including Target (TGT, Financial), Wal-Mart (WMT, Financial), eBay (EBAY, Financial), and Amazon (AMZN, Financial), to name a few.
The Acquisition
Facebook found the perfect route to improve its e-commerce section by acquiring TheFind. Once among the top search engines in its league, TheFind had raised $26 million from Lightspeed and Redpoint since its inception around 2005; but now Facebook Inc. will be the owner and runner of this popular search engine. Facebook has also said to retain some of the key officials of TheFind on its board to continue offering the best to its subscribers. TheFind states to be in a delightful mode for its association with Facebook Inc. The company believe in reaching new highs after being linked with the social networking giant. Facebook on the other hand is equally elated and is looking forward to generate revenue through advertising section. Jointly, they hope to offer more relevant and personalised advertisement for the subscriber wherein a customer will get to see only those advertisements that interest him. This shall also help sellers reach their target customer.
Currently, Facebookâs ad unit, which was launched last month, makes specific products selected by dealers visible to its subscribers. Last July, Facebook also did a trial run of the âBUYâ button. It has also explored âsend giftsâ option and introduced its own currency as credits, but its e-commerce was still in an evolving and emerging stage.Ă
As this merger goes live, TheFind has announced to go offline in a few weeks and is looking forward to joining a platform that can fetch them a reach of over 1 billion Facebook subscribers.
Facebookâs past acquisition stint
Facebook Inc. in a move to become a one stop shop for entertainment, social networking and e-commerce field has been associating with several players in the run and continues to. If we look back in the past, Facebook has taken in the winning horses and not the dying ones. With an intention to bring together like minded people and the entertainment, products and shops they are looking for in their reach, Facebook has pulled in talent and not money on board always. Instagram and WhatsApp are among the top acquisitions of Facebook in recent times and have gained popularity since. Facebookâs key idea is to link all networks where people socialise or share, and thereby creating a single platform on the web.
Competition building among social networking sites
The social media platform discarded away with then popular networks Orkut and hi5, moved on and faced more competitors like Instagram, Twitter (TWTR, Financial), Pinterest and google+ (GOOG, Financial). Google+ died on its own, Pinterest is following its own pace and Instagram was taken over by Facebook itself but twitter carried on strongly and today is considered as the direct competition to Facebook. Analysts believe Facebook is competing with Twitter just for its userâs time, yet their platformsâ purposes remain different. Facebook is a typical social networking site, working as an umbrella for several other indulgements of users (Gaming, picture sharing, shopping etc.), whereas Twitter remains a tool for instant news and information. The two have been seen competing with each other, whether its introducing a new service or acquisitions, but the fact remains that the two arenât having similar future prospects. In July 2014, when Facebook announced experimentation with the âBUYâ button, Twitter signed a deal with CardSpring, a payment infrastructure company shortly after.
Although Facebook doesnât have a direct rival because there are no social media outlets that can match its concept and ambitions, the company has taken a big leap for others to catch up. Introduction of varied experiences like gaming and services like e-commerce have been adding to its network and not posing as a move to combat competition.
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