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fharper1961 | 9 years ago

Money quote at the end:

"“A huge part of an assistant is search,” he said. “Google is a search company. Amazon is not.”

discuss

If Amazon isn't a search company, then Google isn't an OS company. Search is pretty integral to Amazon, search being the main way that anyone finds anything on their site. Sure, selling other company's products is what they're known for, but they do a lot more than that. And funny enough, a search engine is one of them. A9 (an Amazon company) develops custom search engines and search technologies.

You can't pigeonhole conglomerates like that. Google is an email company, Amazon is a cloud hosting provider, Microsoft is a tablet PC maker, Samsung is a heavy equipment company. No wait, Google is a browser vendor, Amazon is a bookstore, Microsoft is the maker of an office suite, and Samsung makes hardware for the iPhone.

Or maybe they're all tech companies and specialize in multiple aspects of that industry.

AndrewUnmuted|9 years ago

Actually, it's pretty clear that Amazon is not a search company - nor is Google. Amazon's market is digital retail, while Google's is digital marketing.

Amazon's tech is all an effort to extend their reach in their primary business: selling products (both physical and digital) to customers. Google's tech, on the other hand, is all in an effort to extend the reach of their ad and marketing services.

maxerickson|9 years ago

I mostly use Google search to find things on Amazon.

jonemo|9 years ago

Amazon actually had a general purpose search engine once. That's what a9.com was. The company A9.com [1] is still around as an Amazon subsidiary [2], the search engine is not.

[1] https://a9.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com

vidarh|9 years ago

A grand total of 0 of the things I've tried to ask my Alexa has been search. If I want to search, I pick up any of half a dozen devices scattered around the room that has a screen, because I don't want to have to wait to have results read to me.

What appealed to me about it was that the examples given were simple and practical.

losteric|9 years ago

The other part of assistance is integration with the physical realm.

As a global store front and supply chain, Amazon has a serious advantage in that area... manufacturers are more inclined to cooperate and integrate with the Alexa ecosystem. Amazon's end-game is obviously "sell more stuff" - obvious benefits for the manufacturers. I can't see a clear vision behind Google's plan.

However, so far every device is a walled garden, a locked-in ecosystem - bleh, huge turnoff.

Is there prior work in developing an an open assistant/querying protocol for these kinds of devices? Some standard way for devices to get data after the device has handled wakewords and speech-to-text? It's a fascinating domain, but I don't have enough knowledge to bootstrap myself yet.

bogomipz|9 years ago

I am not sure I would call that a money quote.

It very well could have ended saying "Google isn't an e-commerce company."

As far as I am concerned Amazon is a search company with two day shipping.

cerrelio|9 years ago

I would put forth that Google isn't a search company anymore. They spend more resources filtering out all the junk on the web. Search is a secondary function for them. The end-user doesn't see the filtering; publishers and merchants trying to jockey for position do.