Google acquired English price comparison company BeatThatQuote.com today for more than $61 million.

BeatThatQuote helps its website visitors search, compare and apply for lower rates and cheaper prices on a variety of products including financial, insurance, and legal services, utilities, and shopping.

The newly acquired company&'s managing director John Paleomylites‚ announced the deal on BeatThatQuote&'s homepage:

BeatThatQuote.com was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK.

Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products. We think we can offer more transparency and better pricing information than existing online offerings.

BeatThatQuote has been growing rapidly &8212' it is currently bringing in more pageviews than popular social networking company Facebook and was the fastest growing website in the U.K. in 2007.

That popularity makes it likely Google will roll the company into its new deals service as it seeks to stay ahead of an increasingly crowded and diverse crop of hot startups such as Groupon and LivingSocial.

Indeed, Google&'s been on quite a shopping spree for companies it thinks has potential. The search behemoth nabbed 48 different properties in 2010, and Google&'s vice president of corporate development David Lawee said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Saturday that the company will be similarly aggressive this year.

It wants its new companies to continue innovating, he said.

&''If you&'re en entrepreneur and you come to Google, your days as an entrepreneur are not over,&'' said Lawee. &''Bringing small entrepreneurial teams into Google who have a strong vision for what they want to do has been highly successful for us.&''

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Companies: beatthatquote, Facebook, Google, Groupon, Livingsocial, The Wall Street Journal

People: David Lawee

Companies: beatthatquote, Facebook, Google, Groupon, Livingsocial, The Wall Street Journal

People: David Lawee

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum Markets Media, which she joined in 2008 from Dow Jones/MarketWatch in New York. Her work has appeared in the The New York Times, the Associated Press, Portfolio Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Barrona4‚¬a4„s. She has won awards from the American Society of Business Publishers and Editors, the Magazine Association of the Southeast, the Mississippi Press Association and the Atlanta Press Club, and was a finalist for the Pacemaker Prize for excellence in news reporting.

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