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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

What's Google known for? Search.

This means people tell it exactly what they want. Who cares what your relationship status is when I can see you type in "wedding ring" into a search box? Who cares where you like to eat in the past when you searched for "chinese food" on maps, and potentially even clicked on an ad for a restaurant?

This is called "intent" and it's incredibly powerful because you can advertise for exactly what a person is actually looking for at that moment. Inference (like Facebook likes and profile details) will never be as good for real-time targeting.

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Why users will stick to Google forever for those queries? they can search those on shopping/review apps.

Because Google has better results? What app has managed to take any serious amount of search queries from Google?

You are being naive here, the edge is data size, what made Amazon stuck out is they have shopping specific data, that's what matters, so too will those specific apps.

I've been in adtech for 10+ years so I'll take my experience and connections over your anonymous comments.

Nobody cares about some app that gets 0.001% of the usage and probably doesn't even have any strong identity link. "Shopping data" isn't magical nor is it of interest to every advertiser. Purchase data is also already processed by specific companies with their own properties or in aggregate by many ad networks. And, in case you missed my first comment, Google recently closed a deal to get purchase data directly from Mastercard which is far more than any single retailer could provide.

If you actually have an example of a specific app that is delivering much greater ad performance then perhaps you should share it.

It’s not about taking general search from Google. It’s about picking off high value search.

Your random searches are not that valuable from a monetization standpoint. Searches that lead people to buy things are. Those searches are easy to pick off on a category by category basis. I had no idea that Google actually took up most of the screen on mobile with ads for products for sell until this thread. I’ve had Ad blocking on for just that long.

So easy that it still hasn't been done yet? What's everyone waiting for then with 10s of billions in profit available?

In fact it's the opposite happening with Google now pushing into searches for flights and hotels with far better UX, even though those verticals were dominated by other vendors.

Zillow, Amazon, Nolo, Priceline, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn, vsrious car sites, etc.

Google organizes the world's information. Facebook organizes the world's delusions.

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