Google makes push to turn product searches into cash
reuters.com
reuters.com
Also, it doesn't say anywhere that they are boosting amazon's competitors directly (or that they are "boosting" anything at all), just that amazon is unlikely to participate in this program that Google is creating that integrates stuff like checkout processes, carts, and payment processes into one unified system.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-retail-exclusive/e...
It's basically just a new type of search result ad that charges companies based on actual sales driven rather than just clicks, and it integrates directly with Google's own shopping cart and payment system to enable things like ordering from multiple stores at once and buying things via Google Assistant.
On the one hand, waiting weeks for a part isn't fun since I've gotten used to Amazon's turn around time. But on the flip side, Amazon doesn't do a great job of giving you better options when shipping will be delayed, and filtering those results/sellers better.
I remember when I built my server and was satisfied with the parts list, I still had to manually add each part to the cart.
It makes me wonder how many of their other "verticals" will soon be, or already are, basically just a new type of ad. Flights? Restaurants? It's important to remember that the average person probably isn't aware that these are even ads.
Ugh. It's a shame that Google wasn't satisfied with just being a $1B company that made a kick-ass search engine and sold tasteful ads next to the results. Instead, they're trying to get a taste of every part of the economy. Does anyone else remember the company that kicked Alta Vista's ass?
They are running out of ways to keep that going. Once everything above the fold is an ad, there's not much more you can do.
This idea is one of a few remaining things they can do. At least until something other than search is driving revenue growth, like maybe GCE.
This is not a socially acceptable way to be towards others.
I saw this coming when I learned that they have started to connect the cap between showing the ad and then directly entering the web page.
Even when there was no correlation, they want to squeeze themselves in.
This made me realize that their endgame is to get share from every sale. They want to claim that the sale happened because their ad and they are entitled to get the share. Maybe not now but soon.
Seriously. The less competition for ads the less money Google makes. Google has every reason to want a crowded marketplace and not a single 800lb gorilla as its only customer.
It allowed me to bypass the multiple nag screens and upsell screens that you have to usually have to navigate when purchasing (especially from budget carriers).
If they do this for other products, I can see it catching on.
Until they bankrupt the competition. Then, Google becomes them.
Now, unlike Amazon, Google's marketplace approach (both the existing approach with Google Express and the approach with the new offering which seems to largely involve the same partners at launch as Google Express already has) keeps the actual retailer's identity front and center, and facilitates retailer-consumer ongoing relationships as opposed to Amazon's approach which minimizes seller identity.
Amazon loses because now I don't trust them to show me the best product. Only what they want me to find.
Google loses because now I don't trust them to show me the best search result. Only what they want me to find.
You lose. Nobody wins. Corporations continues to profit.
On another note, I'm often amazed at organizations this big don't crumble overtime with so many moving parts. It's practically impossible to be without fault.
Google is primarily a search engine, as a product. Google shooting itself in the foot by not showing the best results, harms their reputation.
People already go directly to Amazon to search for things to buy. That has been a constantly growing trend for 15+ years. If Google's product goes backwards when it comes to delivering results people want, that will drive more people directly to Amazon and accelerate the trend of going straight to their site to search for things to buy and bypassing Google.
Google has likely already maxed out on search usage in the US, including on market share. Meanwhile online retail is still only ~11-12% of all US retail. That online share will double in the next ten years roughly. Amazon will be the size of Walmart, in retail, in another seven or eight years, further massively expanding its actual customer use.
Amazon easily wins that battle with Google. All of the expansion over the next ten years is on Amazon's side. Meanwhile Google has an aging, maxed out product in search, and a maxed out product in Android (annual global smartphone sales growth is near zero).
Mass connectivity and the sorts of companies that entails might contribute, but financial structures are responsible for most of it.
Public corporations and investment firms decouple capital from production. The neoclassical economic theories establish this as a reasonable approach to a liquid market, but they fail to account for a few things, including mode of production, which comprises the means and relations of the production process. Whereas specialization brought efficiency to production, these recent arrangements remove production from sight, altogether. Our financial system is essentially just optimizations for doing this type of business, and other industries have followed suit. Monopolies are among but still the least of our problems.
But there was nothing I remember back then like Wikipedia. Encarta? Extremely limited in comparison. (Or anything then that was like Amazon, for that matter.)
I was alive, and my memory is quite different: web search was way more useful back then. Yes, sure, the search engines were simpler. They were more about searching exact text phrases, and less about "guessing" what you meant, or auto-correcting the spelling in your query. But the web itself was different too - a web search with the engines back then usually returned a list of sites relevant to what I was searching for. These days, so many google searches result in a long list of clickbait, crappy content farms, shopping sites, fake "review" sites, fake blogs, malware/crapware download sites, sketchy "best price search" sites, and so on and on. IMO web search just keeps getting more useless over time.
However, in a pre-google web, most sites would add thousands of keywords to their meta tags, hoping that even when the site was not relevant for most of those keywords, they would get the click, get paid by the ads and be incentivised to create more.
And since in those days the concept of relevance (and all that the page rank brought) was still far away, the sites themselves had to catalogue themselves, thus creating the keyword spam.
I remember jumping between search engines; Excite, Altavista, Yahoo, and not getting very relevant results.
Lately I've been trying to get more into embedded electronics. I was surprised how much cheaper it is to find things on ebay and aliexpress. The shipping is often much slower than on Amazon but I can get resistors, solder flux, esp32's, shift registers, etc -- waaaaay cheaper. Though it may be because aliexpress hosts a lot of sellers directly from China where the items are manufactured? I used to think of ebay as auction-only, but I generally research things on Amazon for product details and then go to ebay to find it hundreds of dollars cheaper. Did this yesterday with a laptop. Amazon is less risky than aliexpress or ebay, but I save more than I lose.
(I swear this is not an advert)
Will Amazon strike back and expand to general search?
Based on their existing internal search quality, probably not a good idea?
Man, I feel old. I forgot that A9 came and went a decade ago.
Anecdotally, unless you're looking for something very specific (e.g. Samsung Galaxy S9 128gb) the results become worthless beyond the first handful, probably due to the scale of the inventory and volume of scammy vendors. I believe they have optimised this way; they know people Google for options and then return to Amazon when they know exactly what they want because of the price/saved cards/prime delivery. They didn't previously need to provide a discovery service and so they don't.
This move from Google could bite hard through taking away a small part of Amazon's vendor lock-in value. Perhaps the question could be: will Google provide or incentivise vendors to provide a common rapid delivery service?
“Search engines are weakening Amazon’s hold on product search (AMZN, GOOGL, GOOG)”
http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/google-search...
If they do allow Amazon to list, then it provides little benefit for B&M retailers against Amazon since there is already a Google Shopping component that provides this (except without some of the more enhanced checkout features).
If they do not allow Amazon to list, its one of the most anti-competitive behaviors I can imagine, akin to Microsoft refusing to allow Chrome to run on Windows.
Google's smart enough to know not to explicitly block a competitor, they just make it impossible for the competitor to participate. (For instance, requiring Play Books be installed to get the Play Store guarantees Amazon can't ever sign up to get Google Apps on the Kindle.)
This will be an interesting legal issue when it inevitably gets into the courts. A judge will want to know from Amazon what product features prevent it from participating in Google's product and then will look to see why Google has that feature in place. If its clear its only there to keep Amazon from participating, that can be found to be the same as explicitly blocking them.
If its structural however, such as an integrated shopping cart, that's much harder to argue is targeting Amazon so much as retailers that don't want to integrate carts.
It still feels an awful lot like using an effective monopoly in one space (search) to try to create one in another space (buy).
They could, as Barnes and Noble proved when they went full Google Android from their forked version with the Nook; they won't want to for the same reason B&N didn't want to until it had proven it couldn't get anywhere with it's forked version, since it would be opening up Amazon's walled garden and letting Google's competing market in.
Similarly with cart/payment integration: those don't make it impossible for Amazon to integrate. They just make it undesirable for Amazon since that's Amazon's central value proposition to third-party vendors, and Amazon has no desire to strengthen the appeal of any other platform that offers that for customers and, thereby, other vendors.
Amazon isn't going to stay off because they are blocked (whether directly or indirectly), they are going to stay off because they need it to fail, because it is a replacement for Amazon's already-dominant marketplace, and any gains it makes with consumers and third-party vendors are at Amazon's expense.
It is fine if Amazon does not want to sell but banning everyone else is crossing a line, IMO.
How is it any different if Google refuses to list Amazon products on its search engine?
Sure, if Amazon wants to become a retailer paying a cut to Google's marketplace, vastly increasing it's appeal to customers (and thereby, other sellers) and reinforcing Google's marketplace's competitive position against Amazon's marketplace for where people go to shop, Google would jump for joy. They’d probably even cut Amazon a discount, at least initially.
Of course, there's zero chance of Amazon choosing to do this. A retailer with an also-ran marketplace like Walmart doing it makes sense; the dominant marketplace doing it makes no sense at all.
And this undermines trust in Google’s results, it’s hard to see why this makes sense for them. It’s not like these products are big money spinners for Google anyway. They’re just loss-leaders to sell more ads.
Google has been tweaking their search results since forever. I don't see how now this undermines trust in their search results.
They now want a little piece of the eCommerce pie and may incidentally help competition in that space as a result of it. How is this bad?
Meanwhile, Amazon's "search engine" is terrible, product listing is, in my opinion, a mess, plus there's a growing problem with Chinese fakes. I'd say this seriously undermine trust in Amazon and from what I see, Bezos doesn't seem to care.
If Google can partner with a good number of reputable retailers, this could be great.
Google owns and operates a highway and allows gas companies to build filling stations adjacent to the highway. Amazon is only allowed to have their stations off of exit ramps
Given that, I would expect the folks at Amazon to "not do evil" in form of removing Google products from their virtual shelves.
This is common decency and basic fairness.
But heck, Amazon in 2017-2018 becoming aggressive as Microsoft used to be in the early years of this millennium.
(a joke about both being Seattle based is running in my mind, but I'll skip on it).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_OSAmazon stopped selling Google devices because Google won't permit those devices to work with Amazon's devices.
Side note: You'll find "common decency and basic fairness" doesn't exist in the land of corporate business, and neither Google nor Amazon exhibit it.
In the last few months I noticed it had become incredibly good as well, so I've mostly stopped using Google search. (Now looking for a privacy-focused competitor to Gmail and Google Maps, and a phone that can run the Android OS without any spyware, bloatware, or planned obsolescence).
Unfortunately I haven't been able to use this as default search engine on Firefox. Has anyone solved this?
duckduckgo.com/lite has WONDERFUL ad highlighting, this is what I think should be the legal minimum for it. Not just for transparency, but for safety and security.
Google continues to allow advertisers to display a fake URL on the search page, but actually send you somewhere else, leading to things like this, last week: http://www.zdnet.com/article/scammers-tricked-google-into-po...
Sorry, typo. Fixed it.
> duckduckgo.com/lite has WONDERFUL ad highlighting
Yes. Have you figured out if it can be used as default search engine on Firefox? I haven't been able to... And I'm not talking about a "bookmark keyword", I managed to get that to work.
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-lite/ ?