Details are fuzzy, but it looks like the Googs is trying to take on Amazon in a bid to aid customers in online shopping. Rather than becoming a full-fledged online mall, Google wants to be the middle man – the taxi to and from the mall.
The plan would let you browse for products via normal Google search, and once you find what you want, Google connects you to a local merchant selling the item. No need to get in your car to fetch that new pair of jeans either, a courier service will do that (possibly with same-day service).
The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon Prime, which offers free shipping, movies and TV shows, “helped drive a 42% increase in the company’s sales in the first nine months of the year.” For Google, those numbers mean more people are going directly to Amazon to do their searching, instead of starting out on the search engine’s site then clicking through. It doesn’t help that Amazon has been muscling in on Google’s territory – maybe you’ve heard of a little thing called the Kindle Fire, which uses a proprietary browser that is most certainly not Chrome.
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