I find the 'Peak <x>' meme somewhat tired but the point that everyone guns for the monopoly and is a valid one. I've noted over the years that Google's CPC has been falling steadily, and the amount they have been spending on paid distribution has been growing even faster. But mostly that means that they are no longer the 'new thing' and now are the 'old thing' where 'stream advertising' is the 'new thing' now. And while they really pushed hard on making G+ their stream I don't think it has been as successful as they would have liked.
I've also noticed that search hasn't been about finding every web page for a long time now, now it is a service that is part of some app or other environment, and it isn't unique. The article's point about Amazon doing more product searches, I can believe it based on experience that nearly always a search on Google gives an amazon link that I seem to invariably click on, if only to read the reviews. So why not search on Amazon first?
In my opinion, it is only a matter of time before Google tries to monetize the non-commerce queries. Once the RPMs on Bing, Yahoo, and Google Ad feeds are all about the same the underlying crawling and indexing search infrastructure will become a drag on profits. That will be an interesting time for me.
I've also noticed that search hasn't been about finding every web page for a long time now, now it is a service that is part of some app or other environment, and it isn't unique. The article's point about Amazon doing more product searches, I can believe it based on experience that nearly always a search on Google gives an amazon link that I seem to invariably click on, if only to read the reviews. So why not search on Amazon first?
In my opinion, it is only a matter of time before Google tries to monetize the non-commerce queries. Once the RPMs on Bing, Yahoo, and Google Ad feeds are all about the same the underlying crawling and indexing search infrastructure will become a drag on profits. That will be an interesting time for me.