In a move that hints at its e-commerce plans, Facebook has acquired online shopping curation site TheFind.

Finders Keepers

Facebook explained the move is intended to make News Feed ads more relevant.

"TheFind’s talented team has built a successful search engine that connects people to products. Together, we believe we can make the Facebook ads experience even more relevant and better for consumers.

"Our business is about connecting people with the topics, companies, brands, and increasingly products they care about and we look forward to doing that with TheFind on board," Facebook said in a statement.

Facing up

TheFind indexes products from e-commerce sites, featuring a mix of online and local retailers. So far TheFind has indexed over 500 million products across 500,000 stores.

 While details of the deal remain scant. it's reasonable to predict that Facebook will leverage TheFind's network to make its e-commerce offering more attractive to merchants.

The update comes as Facebook increasingly courts local retailers with features such as Topic Data, which aims to make marketing campaigns more relevant.

Alas TheFind won't survive the deal, and will shut down over the coming weeks. Do any last minute shopping now.