Walmart Taking on Google
Technology is creating some wild times.
Over the last few months, I highlighted how barriers between industries is being eradicated. This is due to technology. It is a situation that takes on a life of its own when we focus upon digital platforms along with the companies that built this.
For the most part, I tend to write about those which were established in this manner. There is one, however, that was not a technology company. Yet, over the last 7 years, it did a fabulous job of transforming itself.
That company is none other than Walmart.
This is no longer just the largest retailer in the United States.
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Walmart Taking Search Away From Google
It doesn't take someone following technology in depth to know that Google is the "king of search". We also know this is responsible for a great deal of the entity's success along with driving tremendous revenues.
Over the last couple decades, nothing has penetrated this fortress. Everything else in the search engine realm was a pretender compared to Google. The numbers spell that out.
Generative AI has really captured the imagination of the general public. The advancements of the chatbots along with image creation software is stunning.
This is pushing for a major shift in the shopping space, especially how it pertains to search.
In the past, when planning an event, it would require doing a number of searches to get the information required to make a decision. After a certain level was achieved, then the ability to do product searches could result.
Walmart and others are changing this us. Using generative AI, they are able to search based upon the event as opposed to products. Instagram, as an example, allows people to enter in the themes they are shopping for.
All of this means those websites operate as the search aggregator as opposed to Google.
Walmart is talking up its ability to use generative AI as a one-stop shop to search when you need to plan an event, rather than online destination to search for individual items. During a call with analysts after its February earnings, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon talked about the gen AI search capabilities in its app.
“The thing we’re most excited about that’s already happened is the way search has improved, and the way generative AI helped us really improve a solution-oriented search experience for customers and members,” McMillon said on the earnings call. “And it happened pretty quickly.”
A Thousand Paper Cuts
Let us be clear: Google is not going out of business anytime soon.
When you are dealing with search, even if these websites become extremely powerful, Google still will have 90% of all the searchable data. So, unless companies like Walmart are going after that market, Google is going to still be strong.
What it does is starts to chip away at the foundation. From Walmart's perspective, this enhances the user experience, saving shoppers time when planning an event. That is something which will benefit the companies that implement them.
Google is also facing challenges from chatbots. Of course, Gemini is one of the strong player so it isn't as if they are on the sidelines.
What is a threat is the likes of ChatGPT, Llama, and Claude. These have the potential to change customer behavior. People are conditioned to head to Google when information is required online. This looks like it is changing with many starting to turn to their favorite bot and prompting in what they are looking for.
This interesting part of this entire situation is what a company like Google can do with this. I am going to presume what they designed so far was proprietary. That said, with open source models improving rapidly, Walmart might be able to take something like Llama as the baseline and train it on the data the company has. This could result in something more powerful and more effective for its sites.
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but google can do it too no?
Walmart can try all it can, Google remains the search engine Giant and it will remain that way for a long time to come.
Wow I am a bit confused I thought Amazon was the undisputed king of search in e-commerce setup, but now Walmart has beaten Amazon in that department? help?
When it comes to ecommerce, Amazon is the king. Walmart, however, is still the kind of retail. They do more retail sales (on and offline) than anyone else. They managed to improve their ecommerce numbers to the point where they arent completely run over by Amazon yet they dont really compare.
In terms of total revenues, Amazon also generates a ton from AWS so it isnt all retail.
It is great to see Walmart trying to get their hands into search.
This is why generative AI is so disruptive. Most big companies are in equal footing. They are limited by their processing power, and the data they can feed into the AI. There are a lot of options to using these as we can see from how Walmart is doing it. I can see more specialized use cases like these popping up in the future.
That is true.
The ones that are left behind are those that do not think they are technology companies. Instead, they operate like they always did.
Walmart was smart enough to shift about 7 years ago and focus upon their tech. It was a wise move.