Amazon launches search suggestions
Amazon is a trailblazer when it comes to getting outside parties (its key stakeholders) to contribute to achieving its own objectives. It was one of the pioneers of affiliate marketing and seeded an entire industry; it has successfully used customer reviews and recommendations to generate lots of content, which has served various purposes: help get products noticed, get people involved, and get shoppers to help one another. It had introduced tagging previously to help people locate related products and now the latest is its “search suggestions” which the company officially announced yesterday.
Context is a critical underlying factor in how a lot of online marketing is done already and how organic search engines will work in future. Getting the end users to create associations of a product with search terms is to make contextual search completely user driven, which is how it should be. At some stage, the user suggestions are bound to be a factor in the way products are ranked and displayed to customers.
This announcement comes very closely after Amazon launched Omakase, its contextual advertising platform for affiliates to leverage. In March, the company had introduced S3 storage; and it continues to invest in improving its technology for customer retention/engagement, even when at the cost of lower profitability. But if the last 10 years are anything to go by, this “technology company” knows what it is upto. It’s strategy of growing big and fast, powered by technological superiority and innovation has led to this unbelievably fast transformation from a book seller to a retailer to a technology company.
