A recent survey by Searchlight Interactive, an SEO (search engine optimization) and web marketing firm, found that 85 percent of business buyers use the Internet during the purchase process. Better yet, 63 percent of business buyers start their procurement searches online. Clearly procurement has moved to the Internet.

Ariba, crowned along with Oracle as a top procurement leader by Forrester Research in its March 2011 Forrester Wave procurement study, takes it even further with its Ariba Discovery offering, which it describes as a next-generation business matching service intended to connect buyers and sellers in the cloud. (”The cloud” here refers to the 470,000 Ariba customers making up its procurement community.)

Do CFOs and procurement need what amounts to another search engine? Maybe. A simple Google search could generate over a million hits. Most people won’t go through more than the first two pages of hits. Yet some worthwhile suppliers with just the right product, price, and terms for you might be sitting back on page 8 or 10 or whatever.

Ariba insists you do need a new procurement search tool. It believes the combination of its proprietary matching algorithms along with its detailed information on the suppliers in its 470,000-strong database will help you make the best match fast. This almost sounds like dating website ads from Match.com, which claims it has led to more dates, relationships, and marriages than any other site.

The Ariba product is not exactly new. Over a decade ago, in earlier Internet days, companies were scrambling to set up B2B commerce and procurement exchanges for every type of product and service in every industry. In April 2000, Morgan Stanley, in its B2B Internet Report, declared “Centralized markets for B2B commerce over the Internet will create unprecedented levels of market transparency and lower the cost of procurement.”

Back then Morgan Stanley declared it was optimistic about the emerging B2B exchanges. The exchanges subsequently proved disappointing. Hundreds quickly launched and within a few years most were gone. Chalk it up partly to the immaturity of the technology at that point; standards hadn’t been widely established, back-end integration was rudimentary and cumbersome, and security was questionable. As important, businesses still weren’t comfortable or fully committed to conducting business online.

Today, a decade later, things are different. There’s the cloud, there are modern browsers. Ariba reports that its search and matching capabilities are fully integrated with its cloud-based service, allowing buyers to quickly identify and qualify suppliers from its global community of over 470,000 selling organizations. At the same time, it also gives sellers of all sizes access to new business opportunities through a community of buyers in active purchasing cycles. In addition, the company is partnering with American Express OPEN and IBM to add a few more bells and whistles.

Still, companies choose their procurement environment for a variety of reasons, the cloud and search being just two. Here’s what Forrester had to say about the procurement options in March 2011: Ariba, Basware, Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), and SAP provide the leading overall solutions. Ariba has the most complete range of functionality and provides the best user experience. Basware scored particularly well for its broad category support and its supplier enablement and integration. Oracle EBS and SAP have very good solutions that are a logical choice for customers of their ERP suites.

A couple I know met through Match.com and married. What might you find with Ariba’s Match.com for Procurement?