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He did address this by simply stating the fact there is no actual "Google Shopping", it's just a term, like "Google Hotels" or "Google Whatever". In the end "G
by OzzyB 9y ago
He did address this by simply stating the fact there is no actual "Google Shopping", it's just a term, like "Google Hotels" or "Google Whatever".
In the end "Google Shopping" is just an Ad Block with a nomenclature of "Google Shopping. They could simply remove this term and put the same ads for Adidas shoes at the top of search results just like do for a myriad of other products and search categories; would that be a problem?
I understand that Google probably has a different engineering platform to present shopping ads/results as opposed to webpages, but is this really any different from other kinds of scraping they perform? They also show song lyrics and snippets from Wikipedia for example. They're scraping the web and collating that info for users to search for.
I think the author made a good case, good read.
- asr 9y agoOne important point for everyone to keep in mind, whenever you read an article about some years-long competition investigation, is that it is talking about conduct that happened in the past. In this case, by internet standards, we're talking about conduct that happened a long, long time ago (but, in this galaxy). When Google shopping was introduced it was a search product, actually, and was not "just an ad." It only became an ad in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping#Change_to_paid_listings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping#Change_to_paid...
- mst 9y agoAha, thank you. In which case, I think the decision applies fine to the pre-2012 form and the article's thesis applies fine to the post-2012 form.