Update: Google acquired Dulance. See my post at SEW.
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Techworld says that Dulance was acquired by Google and that Sergei Burkov, the CEO of Dulance, will run a new Google research center in Russia. I have no confirmation of this. I don’t know how strong the Dulance technology is. However, the idea of crawling for product data is gaining more and more momentum with Pronto, FatLens, and ShopWiki attracting attention (at least from me) because of the number of merchants these sites cover.

Relying on data feeds limits the comprehensiveness of shopping comparison engines (although as Preston Wily and I have said before, price floors are another reason for low comprehensiveness). Dulance, assuming the company had the technology to back up the idea, might have been a great buy for a shopping comparison engine which wasn’t yet concentrating on crawling, but will have to in order to compete with 2nd generation engines.

Thanks to Googlist for pointing out the TechWorld article.

Related Posts:
Dulance - The Long Tail - What Happens When You Move Past Feeds - July 20, 2005
Dulance - We hardly knew you - March 29, 2006
ShopWiki - CTO & Founder, Eliot Horowitz - March 30, 2006
InterActive Corporation’s (IACI) Pronto - April 4, 2006