>However, that sort of search used to (most times) lead to a visit to the airline web site.
I don't think that's correct. In the old days you'd either call a travel agent or use an aggregator like expedia.
Google muscles out intermediaries like Expedia, Yelp, and so on. It's not likely much better or worse for the end user or supplier. Just swapping one middleman for another.
I can't prove it was that way, but I spent a lot of time in the space. For a long time, the airline's site used to be the top organic result, and there was no widget. Similar for other travel related searches (not just airlines) over time. Google has been pushing down organic results in favor of ads and widgets for a long time...and slowly, one little thing at a time. Like no widgets -> small widget below first organic result -> move the widget up -> make it bigger -> etc.
I don't think google muscling out intermediaries like Expedia is a good thing.
Just for example, Expedia is probably 5% of Google's total revenue and Google doesn't like slim margin services by and large that can't be automated.
Travel is fairly high-touch - people centric. It doesn't fit Google's "MO".
But... its shitty that google can play all sides of the markets while holding people ransom to mass sums of money to pay to play on PPC where google doesn't... i think that's where the problem shines.
In essence, you're advocating that eBay goes away because google could do it... they could.. and eBay is technically just an intermediary, but do we want everything to be googlefied?
Google bought up/destroyed other aggregators - remember the days of fatwallet, priceline, pricewatch, shopzilla and such when they used to focus on discounts/coupons/deals and now they're moving more towards rewards/shopping/experience - it used to be i could do PPC on pricewatch and reach millions of shoppers are a reasonable rate, but now that google destroyed them all, the PPC rate on "goods" is absurdly high and not having an affordable market means only the amazons and walmarts can really afford to play...
it used to be you could niche out, but even then, that's getting harder
>In essence, you're advocating that eBay goes away because google could do it... they could.. and eBay is technically just an intermediary, but do we want everything to be googlefied?
I don't think I'm really advocating for it as much as I see as a more or less neutral change.
That said, I'm pretty ambivalent about Google. Their size is a concern, but they also tend to be pretty low on the dark pattern nonsense. eBay, to use an example you gave, screwed me out of some buyer protection because of poor UX and/or bug (I never saw the option to claim my money after the seller didn't respond). In this specific instance Google ends the process by sending you to the airline to complete the booking. That, imho, is likely better than dealing with Expedia.
Companies opt in to sites like Expedia and list their properties/flights/vacations on their marketplace and they pay a commission for those being booked. Expedia doesn't just crawl them and demand a royalty for sending them traffic...
Google has a huge pay 2 play problem with PPC... i've worked for Expedia so that's the only reason i know this :)
It's the reason companies work with Expedia many times because they don't have the leverage expedia group does...
i see it as unnatural change btw... "borg" if you will.
It's actually pretty different because another middleman can basically arise only if it's a big success in the iOS App Store because coming up in Google searches would be impossible and more or less the same in the Play Store. So, Google is not just yet another intermediary.
Only if Google stays around long term. I wouldn't be surprised if each free product on its graveyard took down a dozen of competing products before it was killed of.
Not every market is lucrative in the extreme and it can take a long time to recover from being "disrupted". I think it is also a common practice for larger shopping chains to dump prices when they open a new location in order to clear out the local competition, so the damage it causes is well understood to be long lasting.
I don't think that's correct. In the old days you'd either call a travel agent or use an aggregator like expedia.
Google muscles out intermediaries like Expedia, Yelp, and so on. It's not likely much better or worse for the end user or supplier. Just swapping one middleman for another.