People are starting their product searches on Amazon.com more, and on Google.com (and other search engines) less, according to a report from the New York Times.
That should bode well for Google in any arguments it may face against regulators, regarding antitrust, which is probably why one Googler shared the report on Twitter this morning:
NYT: 1/3rd of (lucrative) shopping searches start on Amazon, vs. only 13% on general search engines http://t.co/sDV6LYfR
The Times reports:
In 2009, nearly a quarter of shoppers started research for an online purchase on a search engine like Google and 18 percent started on Amazon, according to a Forrester Research study. By last year, almost a third started on Amazon and just 13 percent on a search engine. Product searches on Amazon have grown 73 percent over the last year while searches on Google Shopping have been flat, according to comScore.
This is exactly the kind of threat that Google faces when it comes to diminishing search market share. While Microsoft’s Bing poses some threat, Google is likely more worried about losing market share piece by piece in different verticals – more product searches going to Amazon being a prime example. I wonder how many other searches are being lost to Amazon by way of IMDB.
Amazon seems to be doing its part to reduce Google’s share of the search market in other ways as well. Last week, the company unveiled its new line of Kindle Fire devices, and its Silk browser, which comes on them, has Bing set as the default search engine.