Google has made an acquisition today—Sparkbuy, a ‘kayak for electronics.’
Sparkbuy, which has raised $1 million in funding, is a high-powered product search engine and comparison shopping site. You enter which criteria are important to you, and the site will give a listing of laptops that it thinks you’ll like best. You could also use in-depth filtering options to break down results. At launch last year, the startup was only focusing on laptops.
The assumption is that Google will use Sparkbuy’s expertise and/or technology to boost Google Product Search, the search giant’s own comparison shopping engine. The site has been shut down, and from the note below it looks like the startup’s founder are joining Google as employees. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
We are pleased as punch to announce that Sparkbuy has been acquired by Google.
I know, right? We can hardly believe it ourselves.
When we built Sparkbuy way back in the waning days of 2010, we wanted to make it really easy to find the gadget that’s perfect for your needs. Our idea was that you could combine huge piles of structured data with an intuitive interface, et voila: a few clicks to find the electronics widget with exactly the features you want. Have you tried to find a great laptop or TV recently? Crazy hard.
But when people started actually using Sparkbuy, we started to see that the opportunity was bigger. In fact, it was much, much bigger. There are so many “crazy hard” search problems out there we know it could take ages for us to deliver what our customers are asking for. So when Google showed up and suggested we could work together to turbocharge our efforts, we just couldn’t pass it up.
We’re stoked about the opportunity to share our vision for search with a broader audience. And while we won’t be offering services at sparkbuy.com any more, stay tuned for truckloads of new awesome from our team at Google.
Thanks for coming by!