Adding to their long line of acquisitions, Google has just purchased the UK-based comparison shopping site BeatThatQuote.com. The purchase price has been set at £37.7 million (about $6.1 million.) The site allows consumers rate comparisons amid a multitude of financial products including credit cards, car loans, mortgages, utilities, and insurance.
Looking at the way that Google has been developing their search engine to display offers online from various vendors—such as when a person searches a product name Amazon.com, Bestbuy.com, etc. come up with prices. The addition of BeatThatQuote could arrive at a comparison-from-query using Google’s famous search bar in order to help people come to quicker conclusions on what financial company to go with for credit, loans, utilities, etc.
On the site of BeatThatQuote itself, John Paleomylites gives his take on the purchase in a strong, forward-looking statement:
7 March 2011
BeatThatQuote.com today was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK.
Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products. We think we can offer more transparency and better pricing information than existing online offerings.
We are confident that by combining BeatThatQuote.com’s expertise in UK financial products with Google’s technology, we’ll accelerate innovation in this field, benefiting consumers and the companies offering these products. We plan to keep working with our current partners and look forward to working with new ones, too.
John Paleomylites
Managing Director
As noted on paidContent.org, Google already offers built-in quote-comparison capability for UK users to compare loan offers; and also a service that provides US users to compare mortgage offers. This acquisition would round out their stable somewhat.
If nothing else, it will also add to the ever-growing chart of Google’s appetite for acquiring companies—such as their failed attempt to buy GroupOn.
Of course, when Google cannot acquire, they develop instead.
The addition of BeatThatQuote will be another in the line of Google’s consumer-based real-market fastened into natural language search capabilities and should extend their reach into the UK somewhat. Not sure where that leaves customers in the US who would like the same thing, perhaps Google has something up their sleeve for either acquiring or developing for that.
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