
Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales - theBashShell
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-amazon-idUSKCN2231UC
======
bearbin
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.

~~~
gen220
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.

~~~
alasdair_
>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...](https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-
grab-86dfffc0be84)

>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-...](https://medium.com/s/story/jeff-bezos-jack-ma-and-the-
quest-to-kill-ebay-bb4992dc5020)

"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."

~~~
grogenaut
whats going on with facebook marketplace vs craigslist then?

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

------
reggieband
I wondered if this was Google Express but ... nope, seems like that closed and
morphed into something else [1]. I know a lot of people joke about Google
shutting down projects or aggregating disparate projects poorly but I actually
think it is comical at this point. It makes me think of other recent attempts
to coalesce businesses like combining their music subscription services
YouTube music premium, YouTube Red and Google Play Music.

It just feels like Google keeps squandering its brand. It's like they try to
break into a market (e.g. Express for shopping, Hangouts for video chat) and
fail to gain sufficient traction so they shut down the attempt only to spin it
up again with a new brand.

It seems Google's ineptitude at creating successful brands is causing it to
continual create bad products. Instead of just sticking with a brand and
growing/improving it incrementally over time they throw it away. That leaves
them back at square one trying to gain traction with a brand new product with
its own set of issues.

1\. [https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/11/google-express-to-close-
in...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/11/google-express-to-close-in-a-few-
weeks-will-become-part-of-google-shopping/)

~~~
ryeights
Absolutely. The problem is that nobody gets promoted for slowly incrementing
on an existing product.

~~~
i386
And every SVP refrag means killing the predecessors initiatives to “make a
mark”.

Google are terrible at products

------
mlazos
Google has always been a fascinating company to me. A lot of my friends still
work there and love it and my impression of their internal developer
experience is that it’s top notch. This shows me though that despite them
being an engineer-first company (or used to be) they really haven’t created
another dominant business since ads and consumer gsuite. Basically when I was
a new grad I thought if your company had technical prowess everything else
would follow but I’m slowly learning that it’s not the case, sound strategy is
really all you need and you need good leadership for that, which comes and
goes.

~~~
justicezyx
The engineering-focused mindset is hilariously short-sighted in hindsight.

When I was AWS 2012-2013, the sense that the Cloud is going to be huge got
more and more evidences from customer feedback.

When I joined Google in 2013, the sentiment was that Google can easily beat
AWS. But, for all those talks, they have not mentioned any significant
understanding on what customers expect from GCP, and why and how GCP can win.
The idea was simply that Google's tech (and a self-complacent idea that Google
engineers is somehow superior) is just better, therefore it will win. The vast
majority of hard work in between was never discussed.

Even later in 2016, I was pitching my Director to build a Cloud service that
exposes Borg's experience (I worked at BorgMaster team then); the experience
would be close to AWS Fargate (or Cloud Run). And the reply was that its
technical complexity would be too high. Once again, there is no thought given
to whether or not customers would be loving to use such services. Granted
that, I did not have the PM expertise or connections to build a stronger
proposal, but the focus on technical thinking is evident.

~~~
hangonhn
Someone who used to be a Googler once told me: "A group of great engineers
lead by a terrible manager will never succeed but a team of mediocre engineers
lead by a great manager just might." I don't think anyone doubts Google has
great engineers but I don't think it's enough for them to win. All you'll end
up with is a lot of great products with no futures. I found myself in a
similar situation in my previous job: a bunch of ex-Googlers and a weak
leadership team. In the end, we ended up making a lot of components that went
nowhere because no one would pay for them.

~~~
nmfisher
I suppose that, as long as the AdWords faucet keeps spewing money, Google
doesn't need to build great products.

They can just wait for some rinky-dink startup to build something great, then
swoop in and buy it.

------
aatharuv
Wow, their UI... insists I lived in a city I used to live in years back.
There's no way to even just change my city for one search. (I tried changing
my address elsewhere, but it just doesn't pick up the change.)

~~~
vincentmarle
I still can't use Google Wallet to this date because I haven't been able to
update my country since 2010

~~~
AnssiH
Have you tried since 2017?

You can nowadays move payments profiles between Google accounts (add the other
account as an admin on the profile, then remove the original account from the
payments profile), or close payments profiles.

My Google Payments settings were incorrectly set as "business" for a long
time, but in late 2017 I was able to move the incorrect profile to another
Google account and make my main account "individual" (Google prompted to
create a new payments profile when the previous one was no longer accessible
to the account). Presumably closing the payments profile would have worked as
well.

[https://pay.google.com/gp/w/u/0/home/settings](https://pay.google.com/gp/w/u/0/home/settings)

------
kentosi
I honestly thought that Google's shopping tab was a search aggregator into
other shopping portals (Amazon, AliExpress, etc)

In the same way that Google news isn't actually Google serving the news.

------
Barrin92
it's kind of crazy how much of a one-trick pony Google is. If it weren't for
search, which admittedly is very successful I don't know what the company
would be worth.

Amazon's reach, on the other hand, is pretty astonishing. Cloud, Logistics,
e-commerce, and even the media business is huge these days.

~~~
awa
Google has multiple products apart from search with >1B users (Gdrive,
android, photos, maps, youtube).

~~~
buboard
Which of them is profitable?

~~~
mywittyname
YouTube is the only product there that can stand on its own. The others are
complimentary services that may not generate much revenue independently, but
they add tremendous value to an ecosystem of complimentary products.

Example, Android allows for traffic data to be sampled in real time, which is
then sent to Maps.

~~~
samfisher83
Does YouTube generate a profit?

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Google doesn't disclose that, but it did say it generates around $15 billion a
year in revenue, which ought to pay for a server or two:

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-
al...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-
earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019)

------
sudo-i
Google dot com UI is growing ever closer to following in the footsteps of
iTunes. It’s just becoming a cluttered mess and more confusing to users... I
didn’t even know you could shop directly from the site.

~~~
freehunter
The worst part is depending on your search all the different options can be in
different order or sometimes not even show up. My UI pet peeve is
inconsistency and Google has it in spades.

~~~
tantalor
It makes sense to change rank of the search mode options depending on your
query. Some examples...

[supreme court] -> "News"

[make face mask at home] -> "Videos"

[ps4] -> "Shopping"

[cute cat] -> "Images"

Google and Bing have the exact same behavior for these queries.

~~~
maxwell
Personally I prefer how DDG keeps "All, Images, Videos, News, Maps" static and
then shows additional tabs when relevant, e.g. "Shopping" or "Meanings".

Jumbling up the tabs on each search was one of the UI-related reasons that I
gave up on GSearch years ago (outside of the occasional !g, which now usually
feels like being redirected to AliExpress).

------
WaitWaitWha
Different approach to business.

For Amazon, the product is the product.

For Google, the user is the product.

And, as others noted, how long will Google pursue this? It is definitely not a
core competency, or business line.

~~~
apahwa
for Amazon, the user is also the product. everything is a product to Amazon.

they have a flourishing advertising business and have extremely valuable and
actionable data on all of their users.

------
daun
I'm not sure Google can compete as much as they'd like in shopping due to
antitrust issues. They acquired a price comparison company in 2011 and
registered Google Comparison Inc. They shuttered that shortly thereafter. If
you look at various Google corporate registrations they've have a few of these
shopping and product corporations that went nowhere.

------
iamgopal
Why it seems that google is always behind one step ? Last time it was ahead of
the curve was buying android. And, it doesn't seems like it but google search
quality is degrading at alarming rate, for e.g. even when I have allowed
tracking my search visited pages, it failed to give me correct results for
exact same queries.

~~~
scarface74
Have you seen the first Android prototypes that looked like knock off
Blackberries the year before the iPhone was introduced? Android was definitely
not ahead of the curve.

------
MattGaiser
How many people were not even aware/were barely aware that Google had a
shopping service? I wasn't.

~~~
Waterluvian
They do? I thought they have a "Shopping" search results tab that aggregates
store listings. Are they skimming a fee on top of ad revenue for showing those
listings?

~~~
opencl
Up until now merchants had to pay Google to show up in the shopping search
results tab at all. So all the shopping results were basically paid ads.

------
aatharuv
Does anyone know if Google comingles items from various merchants like Amazon
does?

~~~
rstupek
I don't believe you're actually buying the items from Google but through a
merchant linked into the program

------
j749342
wait...google has a shopping service?!

------
josefresco
IMHO this is a significant new "front" in Google's battle for online retail.

~~~
ra1n85
"Google is trying retail now?" was my first thought.

"For how long?" was my second thought.

~~~
freehunter
They’ve been doing it for 17 years now:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping)

~~~
solarkraft
Could they just invert the current scheme by which they shut down businesses?

