The graphs were a bit disingenuous as they were comparing the traffic and popularity of the vertical specific site instead of the click share from shopping quer

The graphs were a bit disingenuous as they were comparing the traffic and popularity of the vertical specific site instead of the click share from shopping queries and how many go to organic competitor listings vs. to Google powered listings (paid inclusion, etc.) When your search query has commercial intent, Google shows their own shopping-powered results at the top and if you click on one of those products, it goes DIRECTLY to the advertiser. Unless someone clicks on "shop for x product on Google" then it doesn't count in their traffic graph. The "internal" nature of the memo makes this even more perplexing as the argument seems almost tailored to convince an external audience who may not understand search as well as people within Google do. I think vidarh makes a great point about Google losing share to apps and vertical specific search engines and many people now go directly to Amazon when they start shopping or directly to Yelp when they want restaurant reviews or Tripadvisor for hotel reviews. Mobile is also changing user behavior (at least on iOS) where I rely a lot more on task-specific apps that I know and trust vs. searching for the details on Google.