Amazon: Where Product Search Already WentNarrow moat

The most damaging thing that ever happened to Google's search business was not a search engine. Roughly half of American product searches now begin on Amazon¹ rather than on Google — and product searches are where the money is. A shopper typing a product name is the highest-intent, highest-priced query in advertising; a user asking a general question is worth a fraction of it. Amazon did not need to beat Google at search; it needed only to intercept the queries worth paying for.

It then built the advertising business those queries support, now running at over $70 billion a year and growing faster than Alphabet's — an ad platform assembled entirely out of demand Google used to monetise. The same logic threatens elsewhere: travel searches increasingly start at booking sites, restaurant searches inside delivery apps, app discovery inside app stores. Each vertical that leaves takes its auction revenue with it.

Alphabet's counter has been to make Search more transactional — shopping formats, price comparison, merchant feeds — and to own the browser and operating system that everything else runs on. The number that would show whether it is working is commercial query share rather than total query share, which nobody publishes. In its absence, watch Search advertising revenue growth against overall retail e-commerce growth: Search growing slower than the commerce it monetises is the signal that the valuable queries are still leaving.