Google, E-commerce | featured news

Google Shopping Express, which launched Thursday, is a local delivery service the company hopes will make it possible for shoppers to get the items they order online a few hours later, and at a low cost. It’s not quite, "click and hear a knock on your door with the products," but that is where Google is going. The kicker is consumers have to live in the San Francisco Bay Area to participate in the program. Google is testing the program there to figure out what same-day delivery entails, and costs, before rolling it out in other markets. For San Francisco shoppers participating in the limited-time program, same-day delivery is free.

After watching Amazon corner the online retail market, Google is in talks with merchants to begin a delivery service that would allow users to order items online from local stores and receive them within a day. But does it make sense for Google to directly take on the online retail giant?

Overstock.com said it has been released from Google's "penalty box," which pushed it down in search results as a punishment for the retailer's efforts to game the search system.

Amazon.com, apart from being a major online retailer of books, DVDs, music, games, apparel, and other merchandise, also has a small business of providing cloud and other Web services. It offers Web services like cloud computing and cloud storage service offerings, in which it competes with bigger players like Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Amazon also owns and operates websites such as Audible.com, IMDB.com, and Shelfari.com.

Google has just rolled out "Google Shopper," a new mobile application for Android devices that offers a variety of different ways to search for products.

The mobile version of Google Book Search gives would-be Amazon Kindle buyers another option for reading classic literature on-the-go.