As expected, privately held comparison-shopping site PriceGrabber.com has been bought by GUS Plc's Experian division, reports InternetNews. The purchase price was $485 million plus expenses, according to the announcement, and was funded from GUS plc's existing bank facilities.

PriceGrabber.com will operate under GUS's Experian Interactive group, alongside sites such as Affiliate Fuel, ClassesUSA.COM, Experian Consumer Direct and LowerMyBills.com, which was itself acquired earlier this year by GUS for $330 million.

Experian CEO Don Robert is quoted by the AP as saying: "When combined with the complementary skills, expertise and scale of Experian, in both interactive and marketing, we are very excited about the future growth prospects for PriceGrabber.com."

Pricegrabber.com was visited by 17 million unique visitors in November and forecasts sales of $60 million in 2005, writes the Associated Press. It competes with Yahoo Shopping, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Froogle.com, NexTag and ShopLocal.

The PriceGrabber acquisition is the third major comparison-shopping search engine acquisition this year. eBay acquired shopping.com in June for $625 million and Shopzilla was bought by Scripps for $525 million.