Information just in: Kelkoo has just completed it’s sale to a newly formed private equity company “Jamplant” as of last night, meaning that Kelkoo will no longer be a subsidiary of Yahoo and will continue to trade as an independent entity.

Well this one came out of nowhere! That’s twice it’s been sold. I’m looking into more information about who Jamplant is and who is behind it – I wonder if it’s some old Kelkoo shareholders buying it back…

Rumour has it that Kelkoo has been suffering over the last year or so with declining margins from loss of organic traffic and that disagreements between Kelkoo and Yahoo staff over how to improve things were rife. Is a turn-around possible?

UPDATE:

Mike Arrington has a good post with more information and the actual update email from Kelkoo MD Glen Drury to the team
• Pierre Chappaz also announced this on his Kelblog (I ran it through google translator)
• Profile information on the new mysterious Jamplant
• It’s also worth looking at my previous post on this topic and Kelkoo’s challenges which are part of the reason for them being sold on.

It had to happen eventually – Google begins moves into the price comparison arena, starting with financial services through it’s new Google Merchant Search feature:

Today, if you type in phrases such as “compare loans”, “cheap credit cards”, and so forth, you get a range of comparison sites from the likes of MoneySupermarket and GoCompare who have spent years getting high rankings in the natural search results or paying a premium for the paid advertising.

Now, Google can’t remove them but it can take a massive piece of the action. Imagine typing those phrases in now and actually getting “google merchant search” results at the top first, in the same way blog and news results currently appear!

It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see how this can also apply to utilities, cars, flights, and generic shopping categories like consumer electronics (a la Kelkoo). This is huge! I’ll do a follow up post on this shortly – just wanted to get some first-hand comments and feedback first..