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Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

It raises the question, why is Google in the comparison shopping business.

Thinking about it, it makes sense for google though. Web scraping and data analysis is their forte. And it fits within google's approach of "answering any question someone has". If someone wants to know the cheapest place to get X, they just want someone to type X into google and get the best answer. For them it's not about making money on commission. Instead it's about getting buy-in into their ecosystem. Apparently they think they can provide a better experience than the commercial sites can.

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They are in the business of making companies pay for placement in the comparison shopping business.

It seems obvious to me that this is just an artificial product to make more revenue.

Froogle was actually better for results a decade ago when they just sorted the normal web scraping for shopping items. Adding the forced ads to show up resulted in worse deals for consumers. This was part because advertisers had t pay for ads, thus raising prices. And part because advertisers didn’t have the best products, just the most efficient ads.

> It seems obvious to me that this is just an artificial product to make more revenue.

If a product is actually generating more revenue, what makes it "artificial"? Do you disagree with the use of products to complement an ecosystem, or do you disagree with the use of products that are not intended to turn a profit on their own, like loss leaders?

Good point. Not artificial for Google as it makes money. I meant artificial for users as there is no need and it replaced a better product that made less revenue.

For example, have a free water fountain and then replacing it with a coin operated water fountain that dispenses warm water is using artificial with my original intent.

My main disagreement is in the use of verticialy integrated products that reduce consumer value but yield higher marginal value to the producer. I’m a huge fan of complementary products within an ecosystem that increase consumer value. I’m also fine with loss leaders, but again I prefer ones that lead to increased consumer value.

Is it really replacing better products? If those products were better, I'd be interested in using them.

Instead, Google gets me the same results, quicker, 99% of the time.

My example was froogle vs. shopping. I agree on search and Google superiority. That’s what froogle was. Their new shopping site doesn’t use their search engine and instead only searches advertisers. Instead of the web.

From an advertiser perspective it is much nicer to use Google Shopping than the old days of attempting to use the regular text adwords to advertise products. Also better for customers on the regular search results page to find products with the shopping listings .

There was a time when Google Shopping was both free and paid listings which was probably a better balance. Even if it still was like this I think having people submit product feeds still leads to much better results than just scraping.

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