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Comment by bearbin | Hacker News Reader

This is a good move but several years too late. Google has already squandered it's lead in shopping when they replaced an excellent shopping search engine with a crippled advertising board that neither shows the cheapest prices nor a wide variety of products to buy. This has been compounded by introducing absolutely no substantitive improvements to the product over the past few years.

Meanwhile, because nobody used the useless shopping search, the homepage search experience has been ruined by the assumption that every search is somebody who wants to buy something.

And let's not speak of the amazon/ebay duopoly that's developed. Google could have fought against that but chose not to in the hope of slightly increased advertising revenue.

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This behavior is explained by the fact that these departments within Google are looking at their “rivals” for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure).

Nobody will remember it, but in eBay’s early days of success, Amazon spent a nontrivial amount of engineering effort into building an auction style marketplace. They actually built something that was better than eBay’s model by many accounts. Nobody cared and it was shut down, because Amazon is not where people go to sell things at auction. Just like google search is not where people go to do their shopping.

From the outside, it seems like Amazon doesn’t spend much time worrying about what Google and Facebook are doing. Not sure if that’s changed recently (Alexa, certain AWS products, Amazon original series).

In general, as companies balloon in size, it’s very hard to draw ROI out of the core product, and these companies tend to bloom into conglomerates (like amazon is, arguably). The biggest mistake you can make, IMO, is when you sacrifice the UX of your core product to benefit these “subsidiaries”, like google has done with shopping infecting search, as others have alluded to.

>This behavior is explained by the fact that these departments within Google are looking at their “rivals” for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure).

In Steve Yegge's post on why he left google: "You can look at Google’s entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don’t have innovation in their DNA any more. And it’s because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers."

https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-gr...

>Nobody will remember it, but in eBay’s early days of success, Amazon spent a nontrivial amount of engineering effort into building an auction style marketplace. They actually built something that was better than eBay’s model by many accounts. Nobody cared and it was shut down, because Amazon is not where people go to sell things at auction. Just like google search is not where people go to do their shopping.

For more info on "Mr Tooth" and Amazon's quest to compete with eBay, see another Steve Yegge post here: https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma-and-the-quest-...

"So, Life Lesson #2 (and this one is pretty goddamn important) is: Don’t try to beat a network by making a clone with improvements. It ain’t gonna work. There is too much gravitational inertia in the original network; nobody is incentivized to leave it."

whats going on with facebook marketplace vs craigslist then?

at least for cars, craigslist started charging $5 for private parties to make a post, but facebook is free.

> within Google are looking at their “rivals” for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure).

Most of my cloud experience has been with GCP, but I tried Azure this weekend. I'm not sure how good specific cloud services / products are, but Azure has a much better story on a cloud-first development.

In Azure, I used Visual Studio Online (VScode in the browser). This ran in a VM with command line access. It's integrated with Github, and I imagine other Azure web services will come next, such as a one click deploy button. Microsoft's acquisitions and open-sourcing (Monaco editor, TypeScript) has been so strategic and well-integrated. Amazon acquired Cloud9 but not sure where that went. GCP had a lead with a more feature filled web console which has all the right pieces (SSH emulator/shell), but it seems they squandered the opportunity to make it fully integrated development solution with a Web IDE.

Story of Amazon vs eBay told by Steve Yegge here: https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma-and-the-quest-...

Could the biggest difference between Alphabet & Amazon come down to if the actual founder is still commanding the army? Bezos is probably a god within Amazon this could be a serious competitive advantage. I believe Zuckerberg and Musk also enjoy the force of good they have created themselves. I don't really understand why you would quit in such a position.

Because some people find other things in life after securing financial freedom. Ceo work is extremely stressful

I don’t remember anything about Amazon auctions, but Yahoo had a pretty good auction system, but it never took off.

Japan is in an alternate universe where Yahoo Auctions is the top dog and EBay is unknown

eBay had issues with i18n and entered Japan 28 days after Yahoo auctions.

Oops!

TIL google has a shopping service. Which is probably part of the problem. I had no idea google even had a shopping service. I don't think i've ever actually clicked the shopping tab before. I vaguely remember when I first noticed it existed, but even when i've been looking specifically to buy something online i've never even thought about using google shopping or even really considered its existence at all until seeing this.

This seems to be kind of a problem with google. I'm usually pretty good at noticing things in software I use, especially changes or added things, except when it comes to google products. I'm still regularly surprised when I learn about or find some feature in a google product i've been using for years or some product that came and went without me ever noticing it was there. Every new thing from them feels like some side project that just gets tacked on to their existing platform without much thought or reasoning until they get bored of having it there.

I must be getting old as a millennial given that I remember the day when it was called “Froogle”.

I remember froogle fondly. it was actually a place you could shop, rather than a directory of advertisements.

If you use an ad blocker the shopping results are probably filtered out since they are clearly labeled as “sponsored”. If you don’t it’s really hard to miss the product carousel at the top of search results.

I bet your case is the former.

No I just instinctively scroll past them. I've come to learn the top 1/3rd of a google results page is usually bullshit, so I ignore it.

I have that habit, too, and since switching to Duck, there have been a number of times that I've missed the result I was looking for because Google trained me to ignore the first result.

TIL google has a shopping service

TIL Google still has a shopping service.

I used it once. I ordered something very basic from a local department store. Since it was a very common item, I expected it to be shipped from the department store down the street and I'd have it in a few days.

Instead, it was shipped from a city over a thousand miles away and took almost two weeks to arrive.

I went back to Amazon and never looked back.

Seems silly to blame google for that.

Yeah, I'm guessing the one further away was cheaper so google recommended it

Basically all of googles products produce significantly worse value for the consumer so that google can squeeze out extra profits. It’s only a matter of time before they start losing market share

I would argue that GSuite, Google Drive, and Gmail (the only things I currently pay Google for) all offer pretty excellent value, even at the free tier (for those which have one).

I used to think that but G Suite hasn't notably improved in years and I don't think everyone bailing to Office 365 / Teams is doing so out of blind loyalty to Microsoft. Google needs to take the user experience seriously — things which aren't a Real Engineer's Favorite Problems™ are often just as important.

In my opinion, the Office 365 trend still stems from Microsoft's desktop monopoly and everyone being trained/taught on Microsoft Office. GSuite is doing just fine but I know of startups and "hip" medium-sized companies choosing it over Office 365 since so many people don't want to change from using MS Office; having to retrain your employees to use Docs, Sheets, and Drive might be too big of a cost.

My admittedly limited experience with Google's offerings for Docs, Sheets, etc was they were noticeably inferior and limited compared to Microsoft's.

In my opinion, its more likely that professionals who heavily use those tools are going to favor MS offerings over Google's compared to people who only need to occasionally created simple word documents or spreadsheets with a handful of columns.

The more I use G Suite, the more I hate it. There are so many edge cases that I encounter in professional use that I never did when using these tools for personal stuff.

I miss Excel the most.

As an IT person, I am constantly shocked by the obscure Microsoft Office features users depend on to do their jobs and consider their job impossible without. Often features I personally have never heard of and find unholy and abhorrent by nature.

G Suite has none of those features. Docs has more in common with WordPad than Word. It's unsurprising offices that switch to it end up switching back as Microsoft has finally stepped up it's collaborative editing game.

And that's before we even get into things like Excel and Access which are basically automation for people who can't write JavaScript.

In my opinion, the Office 365 trend still stems from Microsoft's desktop monopoly and everyone being trained/taught on Microsoft Office

I agree that was true at one time, but I don't think it's strongly the case anymore.

Users, leaders, and IT departments seem much more open to non-Mircosoft products than they have been in many decades. But for office work, few are able to match what Microsoft offers.

I'm hardly a Microsoft fanboy, and wouldn't use it if my company didn't insist on it. But I can see the merit in going with Office365 for the masses. There isn't really a strong competitor.

That's just not the case here... o365+Teams is above and beyond a better experience than GDocs, even in Linux... Since January, they even fixed all the issues I had with Teams in Linux (unofficial and official apps).

I really wanted to like GDocs, it's just a really poor experience in general.

Part of the necessity of Office at the company I work is that they use macros in Excel to help with certain tasks. Looking at it now, GSheets has macros but I’m not sure that they’re as functional as a VBA macro.

GDocs has found a nice spot in one of our departments as a scheduling tool, though.

Been using G Suite at various companies I’ve worked on for a decade and it’s not improved much at all. Docs, sheets and slides are still limited and the iOS app versions are a joke. All that’s happened is that Gmail gets slower with each redesign. One of the biggest boosts to my productivity was reverting back to the old html only version.

Yeah, my experience recently really reminds me of 90s Microsoft just coasting — except that they forgot to get that level of marketshare first.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18948715 Also Excel not standing still. Google missing opportunities here.

They have made improvements though - Google sheets can now work on Excel format files without changing the format. However they have managed to break copy and paste, with trademark Google lack of service. (https://support.google.com/docs/thread/33960847?hl=en - and I see other problems with borders randomly appearing in pasted cells)

I use GSuite for work, the interface is slower than Eudora on a 486, it breaks a lot of formatting from Outlook users, and for some reason Docs and Sheets documents are confusingly in different places.

It leaves a lot to be desired, I’m not sure Office could be much worse.

I'm generally amazed how well the o365 stuff actually works... I do wish I could edit Visio documents online though, viewing seems to work okay-ish. I'm also not sure if/what they'll come up for Access.

While I like JS, I think the shift towards JS/TS for macros in online versions is seeing some resistance to.

All of this said, still leaps and bounds better than gdocs.

Just for comparison, what percentage of their overall yearly revenue do those three products represent?

That's the point.

The ads revenue subsides other products. And that's always Google's argument of upholding that business model. Google claims ads-supported internet is key to retain the free offering.

I’d pay for Gmail, as all my important personal emails went there. However, I didn’t realize that Gmail was deleting my old emails. If they were more clear that if I didn’t pay, they were going to select, then I’d pay. Now I’m just pissed at Google. If they offered me to pay money to make my deleted emails available, and then lock me into a trivial monthly fee ($10?), I’d jump on it.

Do you have a source claiming that Gmail is deleting old emails?

Wait what? Is this enterprise where it was deleting old emails?

> And let's not speak of the amazon/ebay duopoly that's developed. Google could have fought against that but chose not to in the hope of slightly increased advertising revenue.

Froogle (est 2002) has continued to exist in one incarnate or the other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froogle

Besides, Google has partnered with e-commerce firms in the US (Walmart) and in India to presumably counter Amazon. Walmart and Google are the two largest mobile payment processors in India through PhonePe and Google Pay, respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Online_Shopping_Festival

https://economictimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/walmar...

Google has invested and continues to invest in startups, and I'm guessing a few of those must have been strategic investments targeted specifically to counteract that duopoly.

> Froogle (est 2002) and has continued to exist as one incarnate or the other

Indeed, this article is about Froogle (now Google Shopping search) moving back from the change Google made in 2012 to become a paid advertising platform rather than a open-index search engine.

Before they made that change and simultaneously rebranded from Google Product Search to Google Shopping you could make a search there and be fairly sure of finding lots of websites selling what you wanted, and you could compare prices between them easily. But Google didn't get a cut, so now if you repeated the same search, if you get relevant results at all you'll only get the bottom of the barrel shops with inflated prices.

Google certainly has tried to attack Amazon, but the only way they're trying to reduce that duopoly is to insert themselves as a monopoly player! By heavily promoting their advertising platform and pushing deep integrations between merchants and their platform they're forcing out smaller independent shops and marketplaces.

Trying to recreate Amazon, just better, is doomed to failure. The alternative of iterating on their at-the-time working product and extending the usability and visibility of alternative options would have been far better. Amazon's ridiculous 20% fees would get found out soon enough if consumers could actually see a viable alternative.

All that considiered, a better replacement for Paypal integrated with Google and other services is something missing from the world and it's a shame their lack of commitment meant Google Pay hasn't taken off in most places.

I think a lot of Google "squandering the lead" had to do with concerns about the vertical integration of search to purchase being seen as anticompetitive practice.

I used to use Google shopping, or whatever it was branded back then, all the time as a second opinion. But its results became convoluted and simply bad. Slowly I drifted away in an unconscious decision until I read your comment and now I remember just how often I used it. Such a shame another Google product was ruined.

E-commerce at scale is a lousy margin business. Walmart can’t turn a profit from it. Amazon doesn’t.

If you are Google why would you try and compete with them?

You already have sentiment analysis down as people search your site daily and use android to upload your life photos to their servers for analysis. Then you have Transaction data in their email you can analyze.

I think google is smart to let these other companies slug it out and to play tech partner to struggling brands.

>And let's not speak of the amazon/ebay duopoly that's developed.

On the contrary, I'd love to hear more about this.

Target and Walmart are making progress. Amazon Pay and Apple Pay are making progress.

Can anyone recommend a better shopping search engine or price comparison tool?

A lot (unanimous?) of hate for Google Shopping in here. I actually think it's great. Amazon no longer has the lowest price on all kinds of different goods. So I use Google Shopping tab to price-compare across every possible retailer for, say, a specific rain jacket or a TV. There is some junk but if you mentally filter for online retailers you trust/have heard of, you can get a great deal compared to just running to Amazon sometimes. And the filters/search works reasonably well.

That depends heavily on where you are located. Here in Germany we have excellent shopping search engines with Geizhals and Idealo.

Particularly Geizhals is an indispensable product research tool since it does a great job of collecting, normalizing and filtering product attributes - it replaces the tedious process of comparing several incomplete spec sheets with different terms, values and units.

Unfortunately there don't really appear to be many good alternatives.

https://pricesearcher.com seems to be a fairly featureful replacement for Pre-2012 Google Shopping/Product Search/Froogle, but it's UK only and I'm not sure about its long-term survival prospects (and it doesn't include eBay listings).

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