Google has a new search product out; and it is here just in time for the holiday shopping season this year. The problem that the product has set out to solve is the lack of an effective search technology that is customized to retail and business. Google certainly offers a generalized search function to any website that cares for it and pays to have a Google-powered search-box on its website. But this new product, and it’s called “Google commerce search,” is specifically built to help with retail.
What does it mean though to call something “customized search”? To begin with, Google Commerce Search will allow customers to search by parameters that are specific to a retail context. The ranking of the search results that arrive this way will be done to best suit customers looking to locate a product just as they would at a store, with a salesman’s help. Spelling alternatives will be considered with better sensitivity and business owners can do things like place product promotions at the top of the rankings, no matter what.
They call this, Product-specific Search; Yahoo Music has rolled out such a product too to help visitors to its music site, in searching for and exploring music; the new Yahoo Music website is special in the way it interprets the searches visitors perform. Perhaps this is the next step up from Mozilla’s advance a few years ago giving people browser tabs to use in place of separate browser windows – to help people keep their Internet exploring focused and manageable. In Yahoo Music search, when you search for a musician, say Robbie Williams, the original search stays, and a pane on the left shows choices of his most popular videos and songs.
Retailers who pick Google Commerce Search can call in on other business-oriented Google products like Google Product Search and Google Analytics too to help collect statistics how their visitors like to search while on their visits. How much would it cost for a company to order Google Commerce Search integration in their websites? The word on the street is that Google charges about $50,000 for a yearly subscription to its services. For that kind of price, most small retailers should feel locked out; but Google would perhaps do well to take another look at its familiar and stark search results presentation style. Retailers are all about visual appeal; Google’s no-nonsense approach in a sparse format could work for faster search; but what would it do for the retailers who cannot do without visual appeal?
It used to be that you would expect to have an e-mail account or three, you would receive a few messages everyday from work or from your friends, you would sniff when you saw the Spam folder say “100 New Messages”, every week, and you would consider your e-mail existence pretty fulfilling. On the other hand, there is life on the Twitter and Facebook plane that sees your Inbox full with wonderful emptiness every 15 minutes. The social media craze has not gone unnoticed as a potential area to capitalize on, in the search engine war between Bing and Google.