Amazon Is A Threat to Google

From Business Insider, "Forget Apple, Forget Facebook: Here's The One Company That Actually Terrifies Google Execs" by Nicholas Carlson:

Google's real rival, and real competition to watch over the next few years is Amazon.

Google is a search company, but the searches that it actually makes money from are the searches people do before they are about to buy something online. These commercial searches make up about 20 percent of total Google searches. Those searches are where the ads are.

What Googlers worry about in private is a growing trend among consumers to skip Google altogether, and to just go ahead and search for the product they would like to buy on Amazon.com, or, on mobile in an Amazon app.