Yahoo just bought Kelkoo. If you're in the States, you probably haven't come across Kelkoo - thank your lucky stars.
It's a 'comparison-shopping service' to the analysts behind this deal - to the consumers who are the other side of the value dyad, it's more like a massive search engine spam infrastructure. That is to say, it's a comparison-shopping service that offers little real value, because results are irrelevant and inaccurate. But it gets a lot of hits, because it Googlebombs very well.
If you think I'm ranting, check out the results of a simple search for aibo. Aibo's aren't that easy to get in the UK - but they can be found. But in this case, Kelkoo degenerates into a front end for Amazon UK. The point is that the metrics used to drive this deal and the real sources of value creation are hugely divergent - and that's how businesses get killed.
Yahoo's strategy has overlooked it's own economics for a while now (viz. the pay-for-indexing debacle) - but this is the icing on the cake. I was going to write a nice long post on this a couple of weeks back, but never had time - the short version is that Yahoo is going for saturation bombing driven by a value extraction mindset. Not smart - you can flog complementary assets all you want (comparison engines) but you can't extract value until you've created some in the first place (with decent search results, blah, blah).