Why Amazon Is Google's Real Competition 129
New submitter wreakyhavoc writes "Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider maintains that Amazon's reviews and One-Click ordering will undercut Google's shopping ad revenue, and that Google is 'terrified.' From the article: 'Google is a search company, but the searches that it actually makes money from are the searches people do before they are about to buy something online. These commercial searches make up about 20 percent of total Google searches. Those searches are where the ads are. What Googlers worry about in private is a growing trend among consumers to skip Google altogether, and to just go ahead and search for the product they would like to buy on Amazon.com, or, on mobile in an Amazon app. There's data to prove this trend is real. According to ComScore, Amazon search queries are up 73 percent in the last year. How could Google fight this possible threat? Perhaps they could expose the astroturfing of Amazon reviews. Of course, this could backfire, as it would also draw attention to the astroturfing, link farming, and SEO games in Google's search results."
Re:Astroturfing on Amazon? (Score:5, Interesting)
personally I dont bother with th 5 star reviews, I start with the 1 stars and decide which are simply faulty products or user error (you can find a lot of simple user error in 1 star reviews) Than I like to look at 3 and 4 stars to see what the people who took the effort to dig a little deeper rather than 5 stars cause its teh god! That Is my usual shopping research methods
Amazon's search quality is so appalling (Score:5, Interesting)
that I don't think Google has much to worry about. It doesn't even attempt to take the join of the words you enter, and the results are returned in essentially random order, unrefinable and unsortable. It's not bugged. It's always been so minimally functional.
It *seems* to offer more at first glance, but it's only a false hope, and results rapidly go random again. The ONLY time a multi-word search actually works properly on Amazon is when the words match a product name exactly. All other uses are broken in varying degrees, and only occasionally return something moderately sensible.
A professional outfit couldn't possibly do search this badly by accident nor incompetence, so my guess is that Amazon has deliberately made it so primitive in the name of dumbing it down for the masses. This appears to have gone off the rails though, as there was no need to break effective search so completely just to make it accessible.
Re:Amazon's search quality is so appalling (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, but when Amazon does eventually return the right result, it tells you the actual price instead of half the time claiming that a $2,000 printer costs $1.39 because some reseller also sell reams of paper on the same web page. And when the content is sold by Amazon itself (as opposed to a reseller), you can search in categories and get sorting of similar products by price, etc.
In the grand scheme of things, correctness is far more important to the shopping process than ease of searching. Getting better search results from a database is relatively straightforward. The hard part is getting the data into the database to begin with, and if your strategy involves spidering a bunch of e-commerce sites, you'll never be better than half-assed.
When it comes to product search, Google is screwed. It's only a matter of time. Their entire approach is just too completely wrong. It used to work moderately well when it was just a handful of computer product sites getting spidered by sites like pricewatch, but it doesn't generalize very well.
How come Google doesn't have user rating? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know Google is a search company
I know Google's main income source is advertising
But that does not mean Google can not implement something that let users to rate the services/products they received via the vendors they have used - through Google, of course
I believe Google still have enough talents to implement such feature - that is, if Google wants users to participate more in their income generation