Microsoft is hoping to leverage Ciao.com's 38 million users  to bolster it's Live Search standing in Europe.  Since the collapse of the Yahoo buyout Microsoft has been vacuuming up other companies to gain a foothold on the search revenues currentlty being gobbled up by Google and Yahoo.

Ciao, founded in 1999 is headquartered in Munich, Germany has offices in London, Paris,Timsoara (Romania) and Wroclaw (Poland).

The firm, one of the leading sources of online product and price evaluation services operates in online shopping communities in seven different languages.

According to ComScore Ciao.com has more than 26.5 million unique visitors  per month. Internet users will discover more than four million products and over five million independent product evaluations and reports of people's experiences in over 20 categories, such as cars, computers, digital cameras, finances, mobile phones, travel, electronics or foodstuffs. Ciao is ranked as the most popular shopping website in Europe.

Microsoft agreed to pay $17.50 per share which amounts to approximately $486 million, just a shade above Thursday's close of Greenfield Online's closing price of $17.25