[thayne]

I think the ideal solution is to split up google.

And google shouldn't give any special treatment to their own products when ranking search results.

That said, a price comparison tool is essentially a specialized search engine, and it makes a lot of sense to gather price comparison information while indexing for search, and I don't think having price comparison built in to a search engine is necessarily a bad thing. Although, I'm a little distrustful of google shopping results.

[brainwad]

Google would say they aren't preferencing their product. They are preferencing the merchants who actually sell the products over middlemen who try to extract rents from said merchants. Because they put free links to merchants' product pages in search results.

TBH it's the same as Google not linking to other search engines' result pages in its search results. Why would it, when it can link directly the content the user wants?

[thayne]

Google is a middle man extracting rents from the merchants. I'm pretty sure merchants that pay for google ads get preferential treatment in google shopping results. Is it any worse than PriceRunner? Probably not, although I haven't used PriceRunner so I don't know.

[brainwad]

In Google the ads are at least segregated from normal results, like for web search.