Google has acquired Dealmap, a deals aggregator and exchange, and will presumably use it to complement its own sourcing of deals for Google Offers, the daily deal site now in New York, the Bay Area and Portland and coming soon to Austin, Boston, Denver, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Terms were not disclosed.

Dealmap, a 15-person company, was launched 14 months ago at BIA/Kelsey’s Marketplaces conference in San Diego as a spinoff of Center’d, a women-oriented hyperlocal site that had focused on sophisticated mapping and sentiment analysis. Originally launched as FatDoor, it has raised $8.9 million altogether. We estimate that roughly 50 percent, or $4.5 million, has now been spent on developing Dealmap.

Currently, the site aggregates 400,000 deals, from 450 local and daily sources. It claims 2 million users, including 1 million mobile users. It also boasts a large distribution network of 50+ publishers, including such players as Superpages, CityGrid, Local.com, Bing.com, T-mobile.com, MerchantCircle, American Towns, Reqall, Mypoints.com and Topix.com.

Google’s acquisition of Dealmap provides strong additional validation for the aggregator and exchange space, which includes such players as Analog Analytics, Tippr, Yipit, Local Offer Network, Adility, Monster Offers and 8coupons.com. In the wake of this deal, it is hard to recall that it was only a few months ago when the space’s future was questioned by many in the wake of LivingSocial refusing to let its feeds be packaged with other daily deals on a level playing field.

Dealmap, however, has been among those exempted from such bans, presumably because it does more than simply list deals. Since then, we’ve seen new funding coming in. Yipit, for instance, recently raised $6 million.

CEO and Cofounder Jennifer Dulski recently told us it was too easy to think that aggregators weren’t bringing real value to the table. The types of things that Dealmap does are “way more complicated than they’d do on their own,” she said, noting the site’s extensive geocoding and other features. “We are getting comprehensive access to deals from the most number of sources, focusing on high-quality deals, and distributing to as large an audience as we can.”

Will deal commissions continue to flow as deal exchanges become more the norm? Dulski has consistently said that the company hasn’t had trouble collecting commissions for deal referrals. Other sites have hinted at problems getting commissions, especially from the largest players that don’t need as much help. Aside from commissions, revenues also come from display and text advertising.

During a presentation at BIA/Kelsey’s Deals 3D conference in San Francisco last month, VP Dan Visnick noted that aggregators have added value because they provide sourcing for a broad number of categories, rather than simply relying on shopping and dining to carry the day — even though those are the most searched for entities. Aggregators such as The Dealmap bring in hundreds of deals for valuable categories such as hotels, dental and services, he noted.

In the meantime, The Dealmap’s competitors seem to look favorably upon Google’s acquisition — at least, in the short term. “Aggregation thrives on fragmentation. So this is another validation of the aggregation model and the many competitors that it serves. It also throws some water on predictions that the industry will consolidate to the smallest handful of competitors,” says Local Offer Network CEO Dan Hess.

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Last week, the latest spree of entrants forayed into the deal-a-day arena, with AT&T and The New York Times announcing group buying platforms that appear to be almost identical to those popularized by Groupon and LivingSocial. The most interesting of the newcomers, however, could be Microsoft Bing, which opted for an aggregated approach through The Dealmap’s DealExchange for its Web and mobile properties.

Rather than dedicating resources against selling deals itself, Bing will instead rely on the network to source locally targeted offers from more than 300 group buying channels that open up their content to DealExchange. CityGrid Media, Local.com and SuperMedia are among the growling list (now 36) of publisher/distribution partners.

Leading search engines and portals have used different strategies to jump into group commerce. But this much is certain: They all feel the urge to play. AOL (through WOW) and Google set up their own deals platforms, while Yahoo opted for an aggregated network initiative through Tippr that resembles Bing.

As noted above, Bing mobile is also included, reinforcing what The Dealmap’s Jennifer Dulski told BIA/Kelsey at ILM West — that mobile and social commerce would make for a potent combination. Dulski noted that half the site’s usage already comes from mobile devices.

The enthusiasm over deals is well-founded, with BIA/Kelsey projecting that domestic revenues could touch nearly $4 billion by 2015, at a 35 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

As the market becomes increasingly fragmented, aggregators will play a central role in both organization and distribution. DealExchange positions The Dealmap particularly well to strike partnerships, especially with the functionality it provides for the deals being sourced — location, price, sentiment and time (all part of its “relevance algorithm”).

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LivingSocial created a stir when an e-mail circulated from the group buying site informing deal-a-day aggregators that they would be dropped as affiliates. However, as 8coupons cofounder Landy Ung and The Dealmap CEO Jennifer Dulski reminded the ILM:10 audience last month, not all aggregators are created equal. As such, they are not all being treated equally by LivingSocial.

Pure daily deal aggregators — those featuring “a collection of daily deals as its primary content” (via the e-mail) — will be excluded. These include Yipit and Dealsurf, as reported. Others, including 8coupons and The Dealmap, will continue as active LivingSocial affiliates, taking a share of revenues for referring customers. Both companies serve an array of offers beyond just daily deals, meaning less head butting with destination sites.

There are several plausible reasons for why LivingSocial would selectively pull the plug. While Dulski and Ung stressed at ILM that aggregators play a complementary, and not a competitive, role in the larger deals ecosystem, those that barter singularly in DOD could pose a threat. As pure-play aggregators build their e-mail lists, some subscribers may be tempted to abandon the swarm of destination sites and simply hook on with an offer network. In those cases, 8coupons’ Matt Moskowitz told BIA/Kelsey that “LivingSocial doesn’t want to subsidize their entire business model.”

Also, some aggregators bid for and buy Google AdWords and other SEM campaigns for LivingSocial keywords. Essentially, Moskowitz said, they are “making money from LivingSocial, then reinvesting it to compete with them.”

With new deal-a-day sites surfacing constantly (several hundred now) and more white-label providers recruiting publishers to “get in the game,” the noise level will only rise. As a result, the role of the aggregator becomes more pronounced. For second tier and niche sites, having access to an aggregator’s network is crucial. For top dogs such as Groupon and LivingSocial, the competitive tension heightens.

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Center’d’s The DealMap, which serves up more than 350,000 “live at any time deals” from over 150 daily deal and offer/coupon sources, has released an iPhone app that “mobilizes” the service’s top features, including game mechanics, real-time discovery, crowdsourcing and user-generated content.

The app, much like the Web site, utilizes a location-sensitive “relevance algorithm” to select salient deals for users across eight deal types and 10 business categories within a one-mile radius of their present ZIP code. CEO Jennifer Dulski told us that the equation behind the algorithm tabulates “location + price + sentiment + time” to equate with purchase intent.

Offers originate from national deal providers, a booming list of deal-a-day companies, social media and other sources. The DealMap has formalized revenue sharing agreements with “several dozen” deal-a-day companies and derives the majority of its revenues from its affiliate partners.

Dulski says that where the app distinguishes itself from the online hub is in mobile’s real-time saving, sharing and user-and-merchant-creation functionalitites. The platform offers a suite of standard sharing capacitites — Facebook, Twitter, e-mail — as well as the ability to save deals for later viewing and add deals from local business that are not advertised elsewhere, all of which closes the customer feedback loop.

User deal generation promotes an element of “real-time discovery” endemic to mobile by uncovering local sales and deals that otherwise would never surface beyond the storefront. The DealMap incentivizes user submission through increasingly popular game mechanics, which reward deal submissions, downloads and pass-alongs with tangible rewards. A points-driven leaderboard tracks activity.

Merchants can also submit their own deals directly without funneling through third-party providers.

Dulski believes that the app marks a major advance in fostering a “true cross-digital platform” that incorporates Web, mobile, social and APIs that allow developers to build on top of The DealMap’s aggregated offerings. This networked positioning with partners, publishers and developers could aid The DealMap in separating from the increasingly dense playing field, with sites like Yipit, 8Coupons and Deal Radar also vying for market share.

As to our suggestion that a deal a day does not especially lend itself to mobile, where people are “on the go,” Dulski delineated between “impulse deals/buys” and “timeless buys.” Mobile is very good for impulse deals, she suggests.

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