Google makes push to turn product searches into cash

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-retail-exclusive/exclusive-where-can-i-buy-google-makes-push-to-turn-product-searches-into-cash-idUSKBN1GV0B0

by SREinSF • 8 years ago

145 104 8 years ago

reuters.com

vxxzy• 8 years ago

To me, this is no different than how a Grocery store does product placement. In fact, some brands pay a premium to be at the eye level. There are cases where grocery store chains promote their "value" brand above the other competition. This really isn't anything new.

wand3r• 8 years ago

Google is peerless and your analogy fails to account for the store not being a disinterested 3rd party. The war between AMZN and Google is bad for consumers because of the precedents it sets as well as the actual market effects. A slightly imperfect analogy that i still think captures the situation:

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

tracker16• 8 years ago

The Amazon store app on my phone indicates something different from what you are telling me.

slivym• 8 years ago

The difference is the monopolistic element. Apple didn't get screwed for bundling Safari with Mac OS because it isn't a monopoly. Microsoft did get screwed for bundling IE because they are. In the same way if you subscribe to the view that Google has a monopoly on search, then it's anti-competitive to use their monopolistic position in search to enter online retail.

riantogo• 8 years ago

They are not entering retail, are they? Targets and Walmarts of the world are still doing retail. It sounds like they are providing an interface and charging specifically for that interface.

thecrumb• 8 years ago

Duck.Duck.Go.

stryk• 8 years ago

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that, in the last several months, DDG's top search results have been getting much better? I almost always find the most relevant links at the top of the first page, and when directly comparing their results to Google's, DDG results may be in a slightly different order but they are still really close.

zaarn2• 8 years ago

DDG has been improving a lot over the past few months, though IMO it's still far from perfect. It also still lacks the math and conversion tools from google ("19 gigabit / 10000 milliseconds in TBit/s")

sbinthree• 8 years ago

I agree that they are getting better, and glad that in my experience they are not the same. DDG is better for evergreen topics, Google seems to overvalue local / recent now.

sunstone2• 8 years ago

Nice to hear about this. The last time I tried to switch, two or three years ago, the results (a lot of dev related stuff) were really not very good. I'll try it again.

idrios• 8 years ago

I made DuckDuckGo my browser's default search engine a few years ago out of principle, but I would switch to Google very quickly because it was still so much better.

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).

vanadium• 8 years ago

~85% of my searches on DDG are great (and improving), and the !bang syntax handles the rest; usually "the rest" are esoteric items. I see no reason to use anyone else as a primary search engine anymore.

tracker16• 8 years ago

May give them another shot... I intended to try them for a month a couple years ago (left after about 2 weeks, well short of a full month). The results were so much worse for me than google. Having some insight into the usage details they get from analytics cannot be underestimated.

fwdpropaganda5• 8 years ago

Indeed, the reasons to dump Google just keep on mounting. A pet peeve of mine is how they keep making harder and harder to tell what's actual search results and what's google ads. For this reason I actually prefer duckduckgo.com/lite. Check it out, great contrast on ads.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to use this as default search engine on Firefox. Has anyone solved this?

ocdtrekkie4• 8 years ago

duckduck.com isn't owned by DDG. Don't shorten a URL, people will think it's real, I tried it. :(

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...

detaro3• 8 years ago

Unfortunately I haven't been able to use this as default search engine on Firefox. Has anyone solved this?

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-lite/ ?

Klathmon• 8 years ago

[0] is the reuters article that the linked article is based on. It provides a lot more information on the plans and a lot less time spent speculating (with a very authoritative tone) the reasons behind the change. ("Anti-amazon tools"? really?)

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...

dazc2• 8 years ago

Yeah, if they wanted to 'boost' amazon's competitors they could stop having 3 organic amazon results on every product based search result. I always wondered why they were doing this, now I know.

devenson• 8 years ago

Embrace and extend.

Ajedi32• 8 years ago

Google's official blog post on the subject also explains things pretty well: http://adwords.googleblog.com/2018/03/shopping-actions.html

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.

tracker16• 8 years ago

Would love to see this integrated with something like https://pcpartpicker.com/ ... Right now, I just limit their results to amazon and newegg. But if I could keep a unified cart, that makes it a little nicer of an option.

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.

username223• 8 years ago

It's basically just a new type of search result ad...

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?

eveningcoffee• 8 years ago

I was wondering already some time ago that when they will start directly grabbing the share of some other business revenue.

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.

jjeaff• 8 years ago

I purchased a plane ticket recently through Google's system. It was an efficient and pleasant process and they had my card on file already.

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.

tajen• 8 years ago

It’s now officially a business-added service to skip the nag screens...

onetimemanytime• 8 years ago

>If they do this for other products, I can see it catching on.

Until they bankrupt the competition. Then, Google becomes them.

dang• 8 years ago

Thanks! Url changed from https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/19/google-plans-to-boost-am....

philipodonnell3• 8 years ago

The article does not make it clear if Google will allow Amazon to list products on an even playing field with those of the B&M retailers they mention. This is an important distinction.

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.

ocdtrekkie4• 8 years ago

I suspect this will not be "we won't allow Amazon to list", but "we've specifically designed this to be incredibly unappealing for Amazon to list". Given the mentioned notions of integrating Google with cart and payment operations, this probably won't be too hard for them to accomplish.

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.)

philipodonnell3• 8 years ago

Google's smart enough to know not to explicitly block a competitor, they just make it impossible for the competitor to participate.

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).

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

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.)

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.

jacksmith210062• 8 years ago

Sure Google will not prohibit Amazon. But they should consider doing so unless Amazon lifts the ban on ALL companies from being allowed to sell certain Google products on their market place.

It is fine if Amazon does not want to sell but banning everyone else is crossing a line, IMO.

sathackr• 8 years ago

Amazon is refusing to list Google products on its site.

How is it any different if Google refuses to list Amazon products on its search engine?

philipodonnell3• 8 years ago

They are both pretty damn anti-competitive. I expect they will be penalized or broken up once an administration that's focused on these things is in power.

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

The article does not make it clear if Google will allow Amazon to list products on an even playing field with those of the B&M retailers they mention.

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.

tracker16• 8 years ago

I'm pretty sure Google will take Amazon's money if they wanted to go through integrating the google shared cart/checkout and give a cut to Google. Amazon would never let this happen though.

jacksmith210062• 8 years ago

Saw that Amazon is losing product search share to Google pretty quickly. Google share increased over 25% YoY. This might help continue this trend.

“Search engines are weakening Amazon’s hold on product search (AMZN, GOOGL, GOOG)”

http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/google-search...

sunstone2• 8 years ago

Well this is what you get for pulling ChromeCast from Amazon (and other bad behaviour). If Google was as a brazen as that and started using its search results to start an Amazon competitor it would find itself in front of the beady eyed antitrust folks in short order. This is probably the best they could come up with and stay within the law.

plandis• 8 years ago

Amazon pulled Chromecast because Google blocked it from working on fire devices, afaik

aembleton• 8 years ago

That's strange. I can cast to my firestick.

tacomonstrous• 8 years ago

What does that even mean? It's like saying Apple blocked the Pixel 2 from working on the iPhone.

arrythur• 8 years ago

Are you referring to when Google blocked YouTube from Amazon Fire devices? If that's what you mean, then the order of events are the opposite.

gaius• 8 years ago

Sheer desperation on Google’s part. Customers with an intent to buy simply search directly on Amazon as first choice. You only go to an external search engine if Amazon don’t have it and then what does Amazon care if you buy elsewhere?

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.

phillipcarter• 8 years ago

And this undermines trust in Google’s results

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?

tracker16• 8 years ago

I'm not sure about that... I already order outside Amazon when search results show a significant price disparity between Amazon and other vendors. I usually do my product searches in Google when looking for something specific. If the Amazon result is close, they tend to get the sale. There are plenty of times they aren't.

remir2• 8 years ago

Google gets a small cut of each sales, plus they don't have to maintain warehouses, ship stuff, etc...

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.

matlin• 8 years ago

Amazon is getting a growing percentage of direct product searches but Google still processes the majority of consumer searches, be it at a diminishing rate.

hxn• 8 years ago

Better title would be "Google plans to compete with Amazon". They are building a marketplace.

Will Amazon strike back and expand to general search?

dazc2• 8 years ago

'Will Amazon strike back and expand to general search?'

Based on their existing internal search quality, probably not a good idea?

puzzle• 8 years ago

Amazon had what you would call a search engine 15 to 10 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com#A9.com_search_portal

CobrastanJorji• 8 years ago

They did. It was called A9. It was a colossal failure.

Man, I feel old. I forgot that A9 came and went a decade ago.

rovek• 8 years ago

I would argue Amazon doesn't even "do search" of their own inventory.

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?

ibdf3• 8 years ago

I think people that blindly complain about google take for granted the amount of work they have done, and the amount of free services they provide (yes yes, nothing is free, I get it). Perhaps these same people were not alive in the 90s to see how bad things were then. But yet, this war of google vs amazon only leaves customers, who don't give a crap about who wins, with less options. Do we need to pick sides? No company can provide every service you need. What happened about doing one thing, but doing it well?

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.

sidko• 8 years ago

Your reply almost implies that Google is a charity and is providing "the amount of free services" as a public good. It is not.

ibdf3• 8 years ago

I knew this would be a comment, and thus why I said "yes yes, nothing is free, I get it"

hknd• 8 years ago

How am I losing if Google now shows me more results from a bigger variety of shops? Sounds like a win for me though.

jamroom• 8 years ago

Because Google no longer will show you the BEST results - it will show you the results that are most profitable for Google.

gt_• 8 years ago

What happened about doing one thing, but doing it well?

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.

majormajor• 8 years ago

I'd lose more if Wikipedia went away than if Google went away - the 90s/early-2000s substitutes for their products were usable, just required a bit less blind trust and a bit more effort (and remember: google isn't a magic no-effort-requiring box still - it just guesses right more frequently than it used to).

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.)

starsinspace• 8 years ago

Perhaps these same people were not alive in the 90s to see how bad things were then.

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.

rsoto• 8 years ago

I was alive as well, and just barely starting to get into coding, so my analysis will not be very accurate.

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.

samfisher83• 8 years ago

you could just do "Search terms" site:amazon.com if you want to just search amazon.

overcast• 8 years ago

I think I'm being conservative in stating 99% of people using Google have no idea this feature even exists. Majority of people no longer even type a domain into the address bar, they just Google the name of the website, and click on the first result.

tzury• 8 years ago

Amazon FireOS[1] - The OS in its tablets, Phone, Kindle, TV, and Alexa - are all Android-based OS.

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_OS

ocdtrekkie4• 8 years ago

Google prohibits Android forks like Fire OS from using their products and services. You can't install the Chromecast app, for example, on a Kindle, therefore, a Kindle owner is unable to set up a new Chromecast without getting a proprietary "Google Android" device, or using Google Chrome, yet another proprietary Google option, to set up the Chromecast. You'll hit similar issues trying to use Amazon devices to interact with other Google hardware like the Google Home.

Amazon 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.

IBM• 8 years ago

Anything Google can do to help make the antitrust case against themselves is welcome.

conductr• 8 years ago

Not sure how common this is but, when I know I am going to buy something I use Google to search. But really, I know I want to buy it from Amazon. I'm not really searching for other places to find it. I've just gotten used to Google === search. I know Google will help me locate the Amazon links so that's what I use. However, if I start searching for things using Google and can't find Amazon links - will I start buying stuff somewhere else? The answer is no; I will start searching somewhere else.

blitmap• 8 years ago

As an aside, it annoys me to know end that I can't sort search results in Amazon across different departments/areas by price. You have to choose a category like "Electronics" before you can do that. I wish Google made it easier to do more flexible searching+sorting on Amazon.

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)

jws• 8 years ago

Google’s search of Amazon products is frequently better than Amazon’s. For instance, I was looking for a specific long obsolete model of compact digital camera. Google easily finds to used ones for sale on Amazon. From within Amazon I never could make it give me the item, just pages of compatible accessories.

teeray• 8 years ago

Try setting your default search provider to DuckDuckGo for a while. Searching for things on Amazon as you describe becomes "!a thing I want". Bang commands[0] are life changing.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

The headline is substantively misleading; Google isn't planning to boost Amazon's competitors, it is planning on extending the degree to which it is Amazon’s competitor (which it already is, in a number of spaces, including product search and retail marketplace) by extending it's product search / retail marketplace strength.

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.

tracker16• 8 years ago

Beyond this, if Amazon was willing to participate, I'm pretty sure Google would let them in. However, knowing the companies from prior actions, there's no way in hell Bezos would ever allow that to happen.

remir2• 8 years ago

I'm actually surprised Google did not do this earlier. If they can deliver a solid UX and eliminate the risk of receiving counterfeit products (looking at you, Amazon) then this could be great.

ksk• 8 years ago

I'd say the assumption that Google has objective results at the moment anyway is faulty. Google's algorithm is regularly gamed, every single day. Its the entire SEO industry's job to influence them. I would say that this is Google taking money away from the SEO industry, cutting out the middle man.

filterfish• 8 years ago

This truly will be the death of the small retailer.

Google makes push to turn product searches into cash

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