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

reuters.com

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

#71

Post by tracker1 »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #41
Icathian wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that GSuite, Google Drive, and Gmail (the only things I currently pay Google for) all offer pretty excellent value, even at the free tier (for those which have one).

I use GSuite for work, the interface is slower than Eudora on a 486, it breaks a lot of formatting from Outlook users, and for some reason Docs and Sheets documents are confusingly in different places. It leaves a lot to be desired, I’m not sure Office could be much worse.

I'm generally amazed how well the o365 stuff actually works... I do wish I could edit Visio documents online though, viewing seems to work okay-ish. I'm also not sure if/what they'll come up for Access.

While I like JS, I think the shift towards JS/TS for macros in online versions is seeing some resistance to.

All of this said, still leaps and bounds better than gdocs.

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

#72

Post by oarabbus_ »

bearbin wrote: post #3

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 t…

>And let's not speak of the amazon/ebay duopoly that's developed.

On the contrary, I'd love to hear more about this.

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

#73

Post by xyzzyz »

bearbin wrote: post #3

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 t…

I think a lot of Google "squandering the lead" had to do with concerns about the vertical integration of search to purchase being seen as anticompetitive practice.

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

#74

Post by ryeights »

reggieband wrote: post #61

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…

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

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

#75

Post by Invictus0 »

bearbin wrote: post #3

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 t…

Can anyone recommend a better shopping search engine or price comparison tool?

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

#76

Post by daxfohl »

justicezyx wrote: post #27
mlazos wrote: post #12

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 tech…

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 wi…

The way I see it, Google tends to imagine that they have to handle all the complexity and not leave their users the ability to handle things themselves. They want everything to be a revolution. Google tries to deliver the "one true way" for building things.

What they miss is that users are actually pretty proficient at building things the way they're used to. Even if that way isn't necessarily the most efficient it's what they're good at. And they don't actually need or want a revolution, they just want to plop some existing infra into a hosted datacenter, or spin up some dumb VMs and run some dumb VB app on them.

I work in Azure, and I like to work on cool new things like Google imagines as well. But I have to admit, the vast majority of the money comes from dumb functionality that allows users to lift and shift. This seems to be what Google has a hard time accepting.

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

#77

Post by majormajor »

toohotatopic wrote: post #23
mlazos wrote: post #12

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 tech…

Are they an engineering-first company though? E.g. the entire XMPP fiasco wouldn't have happened if engineers had made the decision. Which engineer would shut down an open protocol to fight a competitor instead of offering the better product? In the end, they lost the space to Facebook and now Zoom anyway.

Open != good. "Not Invented Here" doesn't just come about from anticompetitiveness or stubborness, sometimes there are real problems encountered - especially in edge cases or at scale - where trying to fix them through navigating open standards vs making your own thing that works better for you is a really viable option.

See also Google's reinvention of things like build tools internally. Lots of open source versions, but they caused plenty of engineering pain of their own.

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

#78

Post by i386 »

ryeights wrote: post #74
reggieband wrote: post #61

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…

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

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

Google are terrible at products

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

#79

Post by ignoramous »

bearbin wrote: post #3

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 t…

> 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.

Froogle (est 2002) has continued to exist in one incarnate or the other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froogle

Besides, Google has partnered with e-commerce firms in the US (Walmart) and in India to presumably counter Amazon. Walmart and Google are the two largest mobile payment processors in India through PhonePe and Google Pay, respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Online_Shopping_Festival

https://economictimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/walmar...

Google has invested and continues to invest in startups, and I'm guessing a few of those must have been strategic investments targeted specifically to counteract that duopoly.

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

#80

Post by maxwell »

tantalor wrote: post #63
freehunter wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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).

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