Microsoft is still trying it’s hardest to compete with Google and Yahoo! for your internet searching. It’s still trying to buy companies to do so, though it succeeded in the acquisition this time. To help with search results, Microsoft has bought Greenfield Online, the company responsible for ciao.com. Ciao.com is a European price comparison search engine, that is apparently quite popular.
This combined with the Microsoft Live money giving program could make for a great combination for Microsoft if they can leverage it well enough. It should be able to actually provide links to buy products in search results now, rather than mainly links to the the manufacturers page for the product. Sounds like a decent idea, almost like Google Shopping, but in the same page as normal search results if they implement it that way. Now if only Microsoft can convince people to actually look at that page, that’d be quite a feat.
Read [Reuters]
Microsoft has a history of successful buy outs that allowed it to expand its markets and offer new products. It has never used buy outs though against a market dominator like google.
A buy out of yahoo could have worked, anything else, no.
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