Microsoft bags European price comparison sites

Microsoft is splashing nearly $500m in cash on a price comparison and survey company, most of which it is going to immediately sell on. The software giant said it will acquire Greenfield Online Inc, the big daddy owner of Ciao, a group of European price comparison, shopping and consumer review sites based in seven countries. …

[Michael]

I fucking hate those websites

You search for something to find out its specifications, and instead end up wading through dozens of websites that just compare the same fucking sales pages to each other using three month old pricing information.

[Stuart Elliott]

Price Comparison..

Did it shop around to find the best priced website ?

[Anonymous Coward]

<thinks>

If a claimed 26.5 million unique visitors per month, is worth $486 million to M$ -

then if El Reg claims say 5 million unique visitors a month, it is worth roughly $100 million to M$...?

If I owned El Reg I would command the hacks to belabour and abuse M$ at every possible opportunity, and invent them if there weren't any.

[Christopher E. Stith]

Is this the same Greenfield Online that does surveys?

I do those surveys sometimes when I'm bored. So now not only has Microsoft bought up my Hotmail account, the maker of my favorite charting software, and the game studio for one of my favorite game franchises, but they're buying another of my customer accounts at an online business?

This is absurd. Why the hell doesn't this conflict with MSN shopping? When will the convicted monopolists be kept from buying out their competition?

[Phil Hare]

M$ search is third because...

...it simply doesn't find what you're looking for. If I use Live search to try and find anything, it just doesn't find what I need. Google does. End of.

Paris because you'd be better off calling her and asking her to guess where what you're looking for might be than using Live search.

[Tom]

You all ready get mostly crap

So now Microsoft is buying more crap to display.

"wading through dozens of websites that just compare the same fucking sales pages"

And most of them are the same site mirrored onto dozens of domain names.

Maybe MS will block the Google spider and I will not have to see them any more :)

[Andrew Baines]

Ciao visitors

I visit them maybe 5 times a month. All by accident because I'm not careful enough to avoid their results in Google. Quick backspace and I'm back to the other search results.

How many other visitors use them like this?

Paris, because she's never unwanted.

[spam]

@ Michael

Preaching to the choir, Michael, preaching to the choir...

[sean]

@ Michael, Tom & Andrew

try this site ...

www.givemebackmygoogle.com

... it strips out all the shopping comparison stuff. very useful.

[ShaggyDoggy]

I hate those sites too

... because a lot of them are not "comparison" sites at all, they are just front-ends to pull in the punters to a specific finance house etc.

Trades Descriptions should be called in.

[Jeff Rowse]

"cannot find URL, try URL instead"

I really, *truly* hate the way Infernal Explorer "fails" to find a website when I type the URL in correctly and brings up a LiveSearch page that has exactly the same website on a "did you mean this instead?" list.

On the other hand, IE does keep a nice list of all the websites I have visited so my missus knows I'm not looking at things (she thinks) I shouldn't... (despite my best efforts, she still thinks there's nothing wrong with IE so I just use it for my 'worksafe' browsing...;-)