14 DAY TRIAL // Apart from Marissa Mayer's impeccable taste, Google is not exactly what you'd call a fashion-conscious company. That isn't stopping it from applying its best weapons, machine learning and search technologies, to the highly subjective field of fashion. Google just launched Boutiques.com, a new site that learns what you like and then suggests the items and outfits that you're probably going to love.
"A year and half ago, our team started to wonder if we could create a better experience for people to shop online. Our team consists of PhDs in computer science with an emphasis on machine learning and computer vision, along with fashion designers and stylists," Munjal Shah, Product Management Director at Google, wrote.
"Today, we’re excited to share with you our first step towards realizing this goal. It’s called Boutiques.com: a personalized shopping experience that lets you find and discover fashion goods, by creating your own curated boutique or through a collection of boutiques curated by taste-makers—celebrities, stylists, designers and fashion bloggers," he announced.
Boutiques.com comes from the team behind Like.com, which Google acquired last summer. In fact, the site had been in the works well before the web giant decided to buy the visual search-powered shopping site.
Boutiques.com, relies on machine learning, visual search and image recognition to create a shopping experience catered to you. The site learns what looks you like and what is definitely not your style, from a simple, if not exactly short quiz, you are asked to complete.
Users can create their own boutique which will be filled with items they're probably going to like. What's more, the site comes with a variety of tools to help you find the right outfit, many based on what Like.com already offered.
The advanced filters enable you to narrow down your searches to a certain color, genre, patern, silhouette and so on. This is based on the image recognition technologies Like.com and later Google developed.
The site also suggests items that go well together. When searching for a particular purse, Boutiques.com may also suggest a matching dress.
If you're looking for a more human approach, you can check out the curated boutiques from taste-makers Google hand-picked - celebrities, stylists, designers and fashion bloggers.
Each of the customized boutiques holds the tens of items the taste-makers picked themselves but also items which the site deems to be in their style. These taste-makers were asked to take the same quiz users can take when creating their own boutique.
Boutiques.com is only available in the US and only for women's fashion for now. However, there are plans to expand beyond this in the future.