Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

This is a good move but several years too late. Google has already squandered it&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>And let&#x27;s not speak of the amazon&#x2F;ebay duopoly that&#x27;s developed. Google could have fought against that but chose not to in the hope of slightly increased advertising revenue.

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.<p>It just feels like Google keeps squandering its brand. It&#x27;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.<p>It seems Google&#x27;s ineptitude at creating successful brands is causing it to continual create bad products. Instead of just sticking with a brand and growing&#x2F;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.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;google-express-to-close-in-a-few-weeks-will-become-part-of-google-shopping&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;google-express-to-close-in...</a>

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.

Wow, their UI... insists I lived in a city I used to live in years back. There&#x27;s no way to even just change my city for one search. (I tried changing my address elsewhere, but it just doesn&#x27;t pick up the change.)

I honestly thought that Google&#x27;s shopping tab was a search aggregator into other shopping portals (Amazon, AliExpress, etc)<p>In the same way that Google news isn&#x27;t actually Google serving the news.

it&#x27;s kind of crazy how much of a one-trick pony Google is. If it weren&#x27;t for search, which admittedly is very successful I don&#x27;t know what the company would be worth.<p>Amazon&#x27;s reach, on the other hand, is pretty astonishing. Cloud, Logistics, e-commerce, and even the media business is huge these days.

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.

Different approach to business.<p>For Amazon, the product is the product.<p>For Google, the user is the product.<p>And, as others noted, how long will Google pursue this? It is definitely not a core competency, or business line.

I&#x27;m not sure Google can compete as much as they&#x27;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&#x27;ve have a few of these shopping and product corporations that went nowhere.

Why it seems that google is always behind one step ? Last time it was ahead of the curve was buying android. And, it doesn&#x27;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.

How many people were not even aware&#x2F;were barely aware that Google had a shopping service? I wasn&#x27;t.

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

wait...google has a shopping service?!

IMHO this is a significant new &quot;front&quot; in Google&#x27;s battle for online retail.