Sears Holding’s Peculiar Acquisition.

This crossed the wires yesterday.

From TechCrunch

Social search engine Delver, which we placed on death watch a month and a half ago has been acquired by Sears in a last minute play right out of left field.

Israeli business media is reporting that as part of the deal, Delver CEO Liad Agmon will move to Chicago where he will hold a title of VP at Sears Holdings. Delver itself will become an R&D center for Sears and will continue to develop its social graph search engine, as well as additional products. It is not clear what Sears wants to do with Delver. Perhaps it will turn it into a social product search engine, or maybe it just likes the idea of buying an Israeli R&D team on the cheap.

What is Delver?
Delver is an intelligent social search engine that enables you to find, experience and benefit from the wealth of information created and referenced by your social world.

The search engine allows you to discover and benefit from the collective wisdom of your friends, friends of friends, and people whose knowledge and value you admire. People around you are increasingly creating and sharing useful content online through: blogs, videos, reviews, articles, websites, music… and the list is only growing.

By cross-connecting all that content with your social graph, Delver aims to deliver search results that are truly relevant to you.

What is Lampert doing? Well ,first of all he basically bought the CEO to become VP of Sears. Lampert had made no secret in desire to increase Sears web presence. Currently it is a bit unorganized. You have Sears.com, Kmart.com, Sears2go — a mobile commerce Web site, Partsdirect.com (you can almost any part for anything there), Landsend.com, managemyhome.com (allows people to bid improvement projects out) and a few others.

Sears has valuable online brands, their Sears and Kmart site are some of the most visited retail site (although far behind #1 Amazon (AMZN)). What Sears needs is a way to consolidate the various properties in a cohesive site that could be very powerful. For instance. If I am on Sears.com and do a search for “home improvement”, I get a listing of dvd’s from Tim Allen’s sitcom by that name. I do not get choices for managemyhome.com or thegreatindoors.com. Just the dvd. Sears is not maximizing its properties with its search feature. In a way Sears has its online stores almost standing alone rather than under Amazon.com type umbrella.

Lampert has expressed in the past his desire to sell more direct to customers and expand Sears online presence. My thought is this move is a way for Sears to rapidly increase progress there.

This could very well be one of the acquisition that is dismissed because of the lack of obvious immediate benefit that later comes back to give Sears tremendous benefit.

Disclosure (“none” means no position):Long SHLD

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