Yesterday, Google killed its Boutiques.com site and moved some of those techniques into its Product Search. Google Offers – its Groupon competitor – are doing well recently. Microsoft is featuring deals prominently in Bing shopping. Maybe that’s because while Bing is a search engine, Microsoft’s been a destination/portal forever, and Google still feels a little uncomfortable straying too far from general-purpose search. In the battle for social commerce, search will play a big role – especially on mobile devices – but neither search engine is inherently local, though each has a collection of marketing products for local merchants. We’ve got a nice big showdown coming between the deals specialists (Groupon, LivingSocial), the search engines and local media. And I haven’t even mentioned Amazon, Yellow Pages players like AT&T, or credit card companies.