The E-Commerce Future: Search and Google

[mandy]

Like every major sales and communications advance that preceded it, e-commerce's 12-year existence has moved along in phases, as it slowly abandoned earlier methods to accept the new reality.

Offline and online brands were initially kept distinct, then they were awkwardly merged. Initial e-commerce efforts were flashy brochure sites, with rudimentary shopping carts and checkout systems thrown in.

Then systems that tried to anticipate needs and accelerate checkout were deployed.

From Google's perspective, though, one of the biggest changes has been the growing importance of search, both at the site and the Web levels....

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