Inside Google's fierce Goliath-versus-Goliath fight against Amazon for shopping dollars

As we discussed in last week’s article, Amazon – like Google – is primarily a search engine. But since all its search results – unlike Google’s – are products, it’s easy to rank them by price. If you already know what you want, there’s no point in searching on Google first. Your shopping journey starts and ends on Amazon.

Amazon in particular and ecommerce in general is good at search. Amazon, very obviously, is Google for products. It's good at giving you the best-seller you've heard of or the water filter for your fridge (the long tail). It's not so good at the things in the middle.

There are two primary types of shopping: search-driven shopping and discovery-driven shopping. Today, Amazon dominates search-driven shopping: 74% of online shopping searches in the U.S. now originate on Amazon.com (much to Google’s chagrin). You go to Amazon and you search “paper towels” or “hand soap” or “laundry detergent.” Search-driven commerc... See more