14 DAY TRIAL // Google is aiming for the enterprise and business market with several products and it's slowly making some progress in the sector. Now, it's launching a new product aimed at e-commerce sites, but, this time, based on what it does best, search. The new Google Commerce Search is a dedicated cloud service aimed at large online retailers that want to replace their current search capabilities and, considering the lacking search capabilities many sites have, using outside help may be a very good idea in some cases.
“Search quality is a big factor in changing visitors to buyers online, and in making customers happy too. Visitors spend an average of just eight seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website, so having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers,” Alex Dovlecel and Nicholas Weininger, engineers on Google Commerce Search, wrote.
“Google Commerce Search is hosted by and uses Google search technology to make online retail searching both fast and customizable — visitors to your online store can sort by category, price, brand or any other attribute.”
So, what does Google bring to the table. Well, speed, for one, as Google says that its cloud-based technology can provide almost instant results and, judging from the speed of the main search engine, there's no reason to doubt that. Google also says that it brings many of the technologies that make its search engine more useful to Commerce Search as well, things like automatic spellcheck, stemming, and advanced synonyms.
It also uses its ranking technologies to determine the relevance of the results in order to bring to the top the products the user needs. But all of this doesn't mean that Commerce Search is just a re-badged Google Search, which it sells to online retailers, it provides many optimizations and dedicated tools specifically designed for this type of search.
Google now has hundreds of products with very diverse purposes, but one of the company's biggest strengths is the fact that it has managed to take advantage of that by making them work together. With Google Commerce Search, the company also leverages other products like Analytics and Product Search. With Analytics, sites using Commerce Search can keep track of all manners of stats that could prove really useful to see what products are popular and how users generally interact with the site.
A much more interesting option is Product Search, the shopping search engine integrated into the main Google search. Because retailers using Commerce Search will have their entire catalogue in the cloud, Google can use it directly to feed into Product Search.
Finally, one of the new product's biggest advantages is its scalability. Because it uses a cloud infrastructure, it can get more resources, as it requires them ensuring that the search never gets bogged down. There's no official word on the pricing, but reports say it starts at $50,000 so it's definitely aimed at the bigger players. However, there's nothing stopping Google from offering a stripped-down version to smaller sites, something that it will most likely do at some point.