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

Will Amazon strike back and expand to general search?



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?


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

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


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


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.




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