Microsoft and Yahoo have been Google’s main rivals for years. As Google has expanded into more and more product areas, it has taken on plenty of competition in a wide variety of industries. Apple and Facebook are two of its biggest rivals now, but the Amazon/Google competition is emerging as the next great rivalry.

The companies compete in eBooks. They compete in online retail. Google product search has the ability to send consumers to a lot of sellers of products that Amazon no doubt would rather have people searching for on Amazon.com.

Google has Google Offers, Amazon has Amazon Local deals, and apparently that’s doing quite well.

Amazon is now in the tablet market. It runs Android, but Amazon’s version of Android. Amazon even has its own version of the Android Market. In terms of operating systems, the competition might soon even get more fierce as it’s rumored that Amazon wants to buy WebOS from HP.

With the Amazon Kindle Fire, the company’s tablet, Amazon appears to be going straight for Google’s Chrome jugular. Google has always touted Chrome’s speed, perhaps more than any other feature, but Amazon’s Silk browser, could give it a big run for its money, as it taps into Amazon’s EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud) to optimize the page loading experience. Amazon talks about this here:

Silk is only for the Kindle Fire for now, but how long do you think that will last? It’s not hard to envision this becoming a straight up competitor to Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari, etc.

This week, Google announced some new storage and App Engine offerings that will help it compete with Amazon Web Services. Specifically, Google’s bundle of announcements includes: new enterprise level services and support option for Google App Engine, Google Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Storage with new features and a lower price, and new features for the Google Prediction API.

Google gives more details about each of these in a post on the Google Enterprise blog. “We are enabling our enterprise customers to build business solutions that take advantage of the computing power and scalability of Google’s cloud services without all the hassles of deployment of applications,” says Group Product Manager Jessie Jiang. “We have been making great progress on Google App Engine, Cloud Storage, and Prediction API. There is more to come, stay tuned.”

Suffice it to say, that while Google seemingly takes on every major tech and Internet company in one way or another (there may be a few exceptions….so far), it appears that Amazon and Google are well on their way to becoming bigger rivals than ever. It’s going to be fun to watch the different ways in which this competition manifests itself.

Hopefully businesses and consumers will ultimately be the biggest winners.

Update: Even as I was writing this, Google announced the Google Commerce Search Partner Program. It’s offering a reseller program to enable tech partners to roll Google Commerce Search into their solutions easily. Resellers will be expected to seek out opportunities to bring Google Commerce Search to existing or new retail clients, Google says. More on this here.

Update 2: Also some very interesting comments on Amazon vs. Google from a guy who used to work at Amazon and currently works at Google.