After looking at Foundem I can see why this should not be displayed to searchers. I feel like I'm back in the early days of the web!

And only the rich get richer in these cases. ;)

Before Google cracked down, there were a whole bunch of low-quality "vertical search" and "price comparison" sites that rendered Google basically unusable for certain kinds of searches by spamming the results with page after page of highly SEO optimized information-free placeholders stuffed with ads. Their business model was basically to make money by making everyone's search experiences worse, hoping enough people would get desperate enough to click on one of the ads in a futile attempt to get what they were looking for. That's why Google's crackdown hurt so many vertical search/price comparison sites so much; they had no organic non-Google-sourced traffic because no-one wanted to go back there.

it may be a bit unfair to judge them by looking at today's website, which is not in service anymore, even if they have a home page.

"Today, Foundem’s website is the digital equivalent of a boarded-up house"

Their business is dead, because they were artificially demoted to 4th page in search when Google Product Search was created.

Yes but its a poor quality comparison site that added no value I know sites also hit by penguin that where far more worthy.

Kellys Directory for example which had its roots in a company founded in the 1700's

It was always just a basic price comparison site though.

http://www.foundem.co.uk/ is so fast. It's lightyears faster than any other ecommerce site I've used.

Even though the content itself seems non-existent now, I would have used an ecommerce/comparison site which is that fast despite lacking on the quality side.