Rather than just hopping on Amazon.com and looking for products, Internet users were starting their shopping trips on Google, putting an unwelcome intermediary between Jeff Bezos and his customers. Google had its own e-commerce ambitions and early on opened a comparative shopping engine, dubbed Froogle. Even worse, both Amazon and eBay had to compete with each other to advertise alongside Google results for popular keywords like flat-screen TV and Apple iPod. They were essentially paying a tax to Google on sales that began with a search.
