My guess would be that MSN will use Shopping.com increase the depth of their product and merchant coverage, especially in softgoods. We had Meta search, so why not Meta comparison? It also will provide leverage to squeeze the best deal possible out of the two partners as they compete against each other for the traffic.

I think a meta-comparison engine is a great idea. When I was first looking for a business model around Comparison Engines, I searched for 10 products on the top 5 comparison engines. There was no clear ‘leader’ in terms of best price as each comparison engine had a different set of merchants. A meta-comparison engine would definitely be useful. One important question is whether or not the leading comparison engines would allow their sites to be crawled.