[justonepost]

This is sort of true and sort of not true. It definitely does currently work, but if companies like Google and MSFT decided to, they could make it not work by providing search engines that actually helped you find products that are a good fit for you. But that will never be their focus as long as they make money off of ads.

Instead they create search engines that find a series of products that are relevant, though not necessarily a good fit.

I always thought this would be an interesting product that apple should work on. An iPhone search engine that finds products for you. They have the entire market to themselves and bucket loads of money to spend on it.

Apple never was good at that kind of thing, sadly, mostly because they can't attract the best in AI because of their secretive ways. They don't value their employees enough, like Google or Facebook.

MSFT could probably jump into the market to, though, if they made it a part of their OS.

Amazon is unfortunately screwing themselves by going backwards by making money off of ads. It's the beginning of the end for them I think as they get more addicted to that money. The more they leverage it, the less useful they become. Instead they should focus more on fixing their fake review problem.