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Report: Google To Add 'Buy' Buttons To Mobile Search Results
An anonymous reader writes: According to a (paywalled) report in the Wall Street Journal, Google is stepping up its efforts to take some of the online marketspace away from Amazon and eBay. Soon, the company will start showing "buy" buttons alongside sponsored search results on mobile devices. So, for example, if you search for a particular pair of pants, and one of the top sponsored results is from Macy's, then Macy's can pay Google to slap a big "buy" button right there that will take you directly to a product page where you can pick sizes and shipping options before checking out. Google won't be selling the products, but they will be hosting the product pages — "a major and potentially risky strategy shift that will turn the company into more of an online transactional business, rather than simply a provider of links to information elsewhere on the Internet." The report says Google will be trying to streamline the purchasing process by taking the payment from the customer and then passing it on to the retailer, so users only need to input their credit card details once.
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on the one hand, its a great idea. I love being able to do a search and get a phone number and click it, opens my phone app and dials. Its great when integration works well
on the other hand, I dont want it to be TOO easy to buy things i dont need. as long as its not a buy it now button linked to google wallet its a good idea.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
What's the difference between clicking the URL or the buy button? Both take you to the same place.
Didn't Google essentially have this with shop nearly a decade ago? Then they shitcanned that for sponsored links that nearly no one uses, unless you like spending twice the price.
Then they saw how Paypal was expanding (and my god, now. I can use a Paypal account to pay for items at the local five and dime), and introduced Google Wallet, which could have been immense, but is instead a bit player in online payments.
Google already has a long history of innovation but no follow through, and especially now, seems to be running "me too" campaigns rather much like Microsoft.
How does it feel to be an institution now, where you can't seem to devote enough resources to create something new, but instead chase after market fads?
Sometimes when I do a search my intent is to consider buying something but that is fewer than 3% of my searches. I am continually annoyed by the barrage of sales-oriented items and pre-emptive ads when I really wanted a spec sheet.
I would cheerfully say "buy" as one of the keywords if that is my intent. That should be a more valuable click-through to boot.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
We can't say that we couldn't have seen it coming. The Products Feed spec existed for years as part of Google Merchant Centre, now it's one of the centerpieces making this possible - https://support.google.com/mer...
run adblock on google.
Write a firefox/chrome/greasemonkey script to remove these buttons asap.
The last thing I need on a tiny screen with an almost useless browser is a link to buy things.
Thanks
Click HERE to purchase Stupid using your Google Play account
Is Amazon doing any of these obnoxious things?
Because it wouldn't be hard for me to reset my Android phone, sideload the Android app store, and never log into google with my phone again.
That makes sick and twisted sense. People who are surfing from phones are more likely to be "instant gratification" types who aren't going to shop around for the best price or for alternate products. After all, they can't even wait to get home to *search* for the product.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Now we will directly able to see the top purchase products. OTOH we still have to go to the page to compare things. While buying a product almost every person compares, so that does not effect the way people buy things in a broader way.
Google's "Shopping" product has been grievously broken for years. They've not lifted a finger to fix the bugs, even with totally reliable test-and-break cases in hand from many sources, including me, but certainly not limited to me (just check the Google webmaster forums.) They're been outright ignoring robots.txt file crawl rate restrictions too. White hat company? Don't think so. That's obvious even without considering the "real name" fiasco, the image IP blackmail / theft, the "hey, we'll just scan every book there is, because copyright, who cares?", the adwords shift from white-hat text ads to black-hat animated heavyweight unwanted garbage, the abandonment of sending actual checks...
No chance this mobile crap will be worth a shit either. Or good for mobile users in any normal sense of the term.
Google is dying of its own weight in terms of software quality and sane decision-making. Sad, really. But I guess that's what happens when some people get a whole lot of money and no longer have to give a damn.
First they fuck up my mobile experience by putting sites they think aren't good enough for mobile to be off the radar as far a search results go. They say it is because mobile pages are better. I say bullshit. Even on my phone, 90% of the time I'd rather see a full site with columns than a fucking mobile site. Most mobile sites are shit compared to the full site, and the size of screens are more than enough to handle it. Fuck off Google and just return search results without your fucking tailoring.
Now it seems they are OK with wasting screen real estate if it is for them to put 'buy' buttons on their searches. I say again, fuck off google.
Maybe time to try yahoo or duck duck for searches.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Google has kinda screwed the pooch lately. No addons in Chrome forced me to switch to FF mobile so I can use AdBlock and Ghostery. As others have stated, the Google search results are so polluted (especially without those addons) that it is just garbage so now I need to figure out a new engine as well. Never been a fan of Yahoo so sounds like DuckDuckIsTheWayToGo.
... go wrong? From TFS:
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.