Yahoo! offloads Kelkoo for a song

Yahoo! has sold Kelkoo, the European comparison-shopping service, to a hereto unknown English private equity firm called Jamplant. While Yahoo! won't reveal how much it received in the deal, ex-Kelkoo CEO and founder Pierre Chappaz claims on his (French) blog that the company was sold for under €100m. That's quite a dip from …

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy may have a point

While there's a strong possibility that Google would have killed it anyway, I think Yahoo's management certainly did it no favours. I used to advertise on Kelkoo a few years back (for a large entertainment products retailer) and it was pretty successful, and the management seemed to have a plan. Yahoo! took over and that all went titsup fairly quickly. And its certainly not the only Yahoo! acquisition to quietly die in their tender care; anyone remember GamesDomain? Or All Seeing Eye?

[Gordon]

Good Riddance (I hope)

To one of the worse results spammers on the web.

Burn em all.....

[Trevor Pott]

Rent-a-company?

Reading between the lines on this, I wonder how many of those "angel investors" were former shareholders of Kelkoo. It would need a little investigation, but I wonder if the people who got paid 400M+ euros for Kelkoo managed to essentially buy it back for less than 25%. I wouldn't be suprised to see a lot of the same names on both lists at all.

That sort of makes it look like Yahoo paid 300M+ euros to borrow a company for a while. That's something you don't live down for a while.

[Cosmin Roman]

What! ...

... happened! to! the! exclamation! marks! when! quoting! a! Yahoo! story! ?

[It wasnt me]

Genius

I think for me "Excited about the price comparison space" is probably the clincher. If someone can get excited enough about that to invest money, they're an idiot.

Kelkoo (and other s(h)ites like it) are nothing more than a visual annoyance returned as part of google searches. Which Is why anything from it is filtered. If you removed Kelkoo and the rest of those sites from google searches the world would be a better place. Or at least only show theire results when they can determine Im shopping. Most of the time im looking for reviews or tech info and theyre like a yapping dog saying "buy from me !!!!". Good riddance, hope you go bust.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a fan of comparison sites

For some reason they have been engineered to always appear before all the sellers when it comes to computer keyboard purchases.

They are frigging annoying, and more like spam on the web than anything else apart from expert sex change.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please go under please go under please go under....

I'm fed up typing "sony tv reviews" or "dvd recorder reviews" into google and getting 500 links to "Best price for Sony tv reviews" or "Shop for DVD recorder reviews at..."

And ciao and pricerunner and the rest can burn in silicon hell too!

[Anonymously Deflowered]

@Gordon

Agreed - good riddance to Kelkoo and any other site like it. A waste of bandwidth and as you said, the search engine equivalent of spam.

What the hell were Yahoo! thinking? I suppose that could be said of many of Yahoo's business deals.