Rumor: Google Acquires Dulance

Techworld is reporting that Google has quietly acquired shopping engine Dulance. (And apparently, Sergei Burkov, Dulance's former CEO, will head up Google's R&D projects in Russia.)

Why would Google buy Dulance?
Dulance was an RSS-powered shopping site that spidered and scraped retail sites to find product prices -- without relying on retailers to upload product data feeds. It is estimated that because shopping engines use these opt-in retailer feeds, they only serve up 10% of the web's available product inventory (see Wikipedia on Dulance). Incorporating Dulance's technology would extend Froogle's reach into the uncrawled depths of retailer websites where the other 90% of products are waiting. Most importantly, the Dulance technology would give shoppers substantial justification for choosing Froogle over other shopping engines like Shopping, PriceGrabber, NexTag, etc, which currently still rely on retailer feeds. (Related Reading: See my post Froogle Local Finds No Socks in NYC for understanding the need for auto-discovery of products on retailers' websites.)

What happened to Dulance?
The domain dulance.com, where the shopping engine was once located, no longer resolves. You can, however, see previous versions of the shopping site on Internet Archive. SearchEngineWatch noted Dulance's disappearance briefly last month, which means it is possible the acquisition took place silently several weeks ago. To date, Google has made no comment on Dulance, so keep in mind this acquisition is just a rumor.