• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 16, 2015

Facebook, a mobile-first company, has bought the shopping search engine TheFind, with plans to capitalize on the technology and close it down. Some members of the team will join the social site to integrate its technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg has said the majority of the users access the social site via mobile. Making it easier to search, view and purchase products on a small screen would move mobile ecommerce to the next step. 

TheFind -- a Mountain View search engine -- aggregates clothing selections, allowing shoppers to search hundreds of different sites for specific products by identifying the items as big, bold images. It launched in 2006.

"Facebook's resources and platform give us the opportunity to scale our expertise in product sourcing to the over 1 billion people that use the platform," said a statement on TheFind.

The number of mobile Facebook users worldwide will near 1 billion in 2015, eMarketer estimates. More than 70% of all Facebook users globally will use mobile this year, and by 2018, more than three-quarters of the social network's audience will access it via mobile phones on a regular basis, reaching 1.34 billion users.

The idea to make it easier to buy on mobile makes sense. While TheFind team said it will make sure Facebook users see ads for products they want, some believe the acquisition also gives the social site the e-commerce tools it needs to make ad targeting pay off.

The deal follows a series of steps by Facebook to get its users to search and shop through the platform. So far the company has failed to gain momentum. Third-party companies such as Shopify tried to step in and pick-up the slack. Last year, Facebook also began testing a buy button that appeared on advertisements across the site.

There are about 157.1 million U.S. Facebook users, up from 152.4 million in the year prior, per eMarketer. The analysis firm still sees growth in the coming years, up to 172 million by 2019.

The U.S. will remain the largest market for mobile phone Facebook users this year. Nearly 80% of Facebook users in the country, or 123.1 million people, will access the site regularly via mobile phones.