indyank - 5:41 am on Oct 26, 2012 (gmt 0)

There are already quite a few large product comparison sites! And quite a few auction sites

Yeah but their days are probably numbered...This one quote summarizes all the recent steps of Google. Carousel of images (scraped), knowledge graph with information (scraped) and they probably would go on to add reviews as well, which might either be scraped or come from one of Google's own aggregator/crowd sourcing platform. All they need to do is add product listings from their partners with a Buy button.

All these aren't done for users as users never complained of going to third party sites for getting the good content.But google has scraped and introduced all these on their own SERPS to ensure their product listings are close to action.

Some might justify this as natural progression of search engines!