eBay goes Shopping.com
According to this WSJ story (subscription required), eBay acquired Shopping.com for $620M. Watch out Froogle (which, BTW, I'm very disappointed with so far since it doesn't seem to work very well every time I've tried to use it).
Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America, said eBay became interested in Shopping.com when it noticed its sellers listing merchandise on comparison-shopping sites.
...Shopping.com, for example, relies on Google to place advertisements on its site. Those ads accounted for 44% of the Brisbane, Calif., company's revenue of $28.9 million in the first quarter, according to the company's quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. EBay officials declined to address the future of the relationship between Shopping.com and Google, which also declined to comment. But the deal marks an acknowledgment by eBay that it needs to reach potential Internet buyers earlier in their shopping process, through search technology.