The World Product Graph: How Product Data Became Retail Infrastructure

A historical timeline tracing the long shift from paper catalogs and barcodes to universal product databases, price-comparison engines, marketplace catalogs, and AI shopping agents. The reported Amazon 'World Product Graph' plan would sit at the end of that arc: a bid to turn product metadata itself into private infrastructure, potentially reshaping how shoppers find goods and how merchants are discovered. This timeline was generated automatically by TimeStrands AI from Wikipedia research. Facts are sourced; framing may be imperfect.