With its Shopping Graph-which lets 1.7 million merchants feature relevant listings across Google using simple but interlinked tools-Google is ready to meet Amazon’s challenge.ĭatagraphs capture how people work, play, learn, socialize, transact, travel, and do any other activity that can be associated with commerce.ĭatagraphs like Amazon’s and Google’s rely on product-in-use data-that is, data on the behavior of customers as they use a platform or a product-to capture the connections, relationships, and interrelationships between a company and its customers. It builds on Google’s unparalleled Knowledge Graph, which captures information about the entities in its vast network and the relationships among them, including structured and unstructured data from Android, voice and image search, Chrome browser extensions, Google Assistant, Gmail, Photos, Maps, YouTube, Google Cloud, and Google Pay. More than a billion people research products on Google each day, and Shopping Graph connects them with more than 24 billion listings from millions of merchants across the web. To compete with Amazon, in April 2021 Google announced its Shopping Graph, an AI-enhanced model that recommends products to users as they search. e-commerce market its closest rival, Walmart, has a market share of only 7%. Thanks to its rich data and industry-leading personalization, Amazon now owns 40% of the U.S. Its algorithms use collaborative filtering-incorporating factors such as diversity (how dissimilar the recommended items are) serendipity (how surprising they are) and novelty (how new they are)-to generate some of the most sophisticated recommendations on the planet. Amazon’s purchase graph connects purchase history with browsing data on the site, viewing data on Prime Video, listening data on Amazon Music, and data from Alexa-enabled devices. These recommendations are powered by Amazon’s ever-evolving purchase graph, which is a digital representation of real-world “entities”-anything about which it stores information, such as customers, products, purchases, events, and places-and the relationships and interrelationships among them. When you visit the site, its algorithms select an assortment of products from about 353 million items and arrange them for you according to what they predict you will want at that precise moment. Of the 4,000 products Amazon sells every minute, approximately 50% are presented to customers by its personalized recommendation engine.