Facebook has added an e-commerce company to its shopping cart.
The social network today acquired TheFind, a shopping search engine with an index of 500 million products across 500,000 stores. TheFind’s technology personalizes the shopping experience for signed-in users, who are given the choice to tie in their Facebook accounts, making it possible to taylor their experience based on Facebook “likes.” TheFind also has a product ranking engine that identifies popular products and stores for each search.
Now that computing power, both companies said, will be used to serve Facebook ads that are more relevant.
A Facebook spokesperson emailed this comment:
“We’re excited to welcome TheFind to Facebook. 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.”
In an announcement on its site, TheFind said it will shut down its shopping search engine in the next few weeks. Here’s the full announcement:
For the last nine years, we’ve worked hard to bring you a shopping experience that’s easy, efficient and fun – searching all the stores on the web to find just the right products you’re looking to buy. We are now starting our next chapter by combining forces with Facebook to do even more for consumers. Facebook’s resources and platform give us the opportunity to scale our expertise in product sourcing to the over 1 billion people that use the platform. Key members of our team are joining the company and will be working hard to integrate our technology to make the ads you see on Facebook every day better and more relevant to you. Unfortunately, this means we will be taking our search engine offline in the next few weeks. Thank you for your loyalty and for making this a fun journey for all of us!
The move also might help Facebook with its tests of a Buy button. The company, which has had a checkered history of e-commerce efforts, started testing an in-stream Buy button last July, but has said little about it publicly since.
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