Google Acquires Product Search Engine Sparkbuy

The world’s largest online search engine, Google Inc., has acquired the product search engine Sparkbuy, according to a note on the Sparkbuy website.

Google has yet to issue an official announcement concerning its latest acquisition, and at this time, the terms of the deal are being kept strictly private.

 Sparkbuy to date has raised about $1-million in venture capital funding and was founded by Dan Shapiro in 2010 after he was disappointed with current search methods when he was looking at purchasing a new laptop. The search engine aims to allow a user to easily get recommendations on consumer electronics (like laptops) based on various input criteria and preferences, including price, feature options (like memory, hard drive space, battery life, etc.), among other filters.

The search engine works by aggregating various bits of information about products and generating recommendations based on aggregated data. Sparkbuy has thousands of products in its database, including from Amazon Inc., and even has more than 3,000 products from North America’s largest consumer electronics chain Best Buy Inc. after reaching a deal with the company within weeks after it launched.

If you were hoping to use Sparkbuy now, unfortunately, that is no longer a possibility as the service has already been shut down as a direct result of the acquisition.

Sparkbuy said in a statement, “We’re stoked about the opportunity to share our vision for search with a broader audience. And while we won’t be offering services at sparkbuy.com any more, stay tuned for truckloads of new awesome from our team at Google.”

Google is expected to incorporate proprietary Sparkbuy algorithms in its current product search engine to generate more relevant results.

The small Sparkbuy team will now join the Google camp at the company’s California headquarters.

The Google stock (NASDAQ:GOOG) closed down just over 10-basis point at the end of the last trading week to $518.39 per share.

Most recently, Google reported total revenue of $8.58-billion in Q1 2011, up 27-percent from the same period last year. Google reported GAAP net income of $2.30-billion in the same period.