Travel Search Sites Kayak, SideStep Connect

In the official press release, forms of the word "merge" are used four times, "purchasing" comes up once, and "acquire" and "buy" are nowhere to be seen.  Nonetheless, the bottom line is that Kayak.com secured a spectacular round of funding, and proceeded to take over SideStep.com.

Kayak and SideStep are both in the travel search business; prior to this development, they were often seen as competitors.  But in the same turning-the-world-on-its-head press release, the co-founder and CEO of Kayak insists, "With less than 10 percent overlap between existing Kayak.com and SideStep.com users, each site stands to gain millions of new users."

Which could justify why Kayak was willing to spend something in the neighborhood of $200 million on SideStep. 

In his coverage of the development,