By : Admin

Microsoft have recently purchased Jellyfish.com, a Madison, Wisconsin-based company, which is a high end comparative shopping engine with a community twist. It generates large discounts by mobilizing large groups of buyers through chat and auctions to purchase a single product on a single day.

The terms of the deal are not disclosed.

Jellyfish is an online shopping venture, to augment its Live Search engine. Jellyfish acts like a reverse auction through which retailers are ranked according to the amount they agree to lower their prices. The more they drop the price, the higher up in the search results advertisers appear.

Well known comparative shopping engine Jellyfish.com is known for its unconventional approach to online commerce. The site allows users to get cash-back on purchases made through it by sharing a portion of its advertising revenue. Advertisers choose the level of commission they will give to the site, half of which is given back to the consumer. Jellyfish has created a niche search platform designed to provide a more efficient and rewarding discount shopping experience.

The site will remain separate from other products by Microsoft, but act as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Redmond company. And all of Jellyfish’s 26 employees will stay on board and remain in Wisconsin.. Co-founded by Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire, this is the third company that Wiegand has sold, including Business Filings which was sold to a Dutch publishing company in 2002 for $14 million. Jellyfish had also raised about $5 million a year ago, with much of the funding going towards the improvement of Jellyfish’s search technology and social components for shopping online.

It’s expected that Jellyfish will be incorporated into Windows Live search, but its extensive social networking components and live games, including Smack Shopping, are the crowning jewels of its social shopping experience. With Microsoft’s revised focus on growing its online presence in the social networking realm, this may be more heavily incorporated into some of Windows Live’s other services, such as its niche community or moms.

Microsoft has also announced that it will be tweaking its ad platform for Windows Live Search, which will shift more attention to the quality of prominent ad placement. Yahoo has incorporated some fun shopping tools on its portal as well, with the promotion of the Woot Daily Deal. DivX has also swapped Google for Yahoo to power its search or its online video-sharing networks.

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