Mountain View, California — Global search leader Google has made its latest move just in the nick of time for the holiday shopping season. Google on Thursday rolled out a new search engine service dubbed as “Google Commerce Search” specifically designed for large e-commerce sites, which online retailers may find incredibly useful for improving the product search on their site, and potentially increasing sales and reducing bounce rates, as the Internet giant widens its hunt for new sources of revenue.
The newly released Google Commerce Search, which includes capabilities like spell check, synonyms, sorting and parametric search, particularly created to deliver some of Google’s best search innovations to sites like Birkenstock USA, and other companies of all magnitude.
Google could not have sensed any better time for such a release with the holiday shopping season arriving.
“We are excited to bring Google Commerce Search to market in time for the holidays,” said Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, in a statement. “To date the technology serving retail website stores has not kept pace with modernization in search. Google Commerce Search will help customers find accurate results extremely fast, to the benefit of retailers and customers alike.”
“Search quality is a major factor in changing visitors to buyers online, and in making customers happy too,” Google says. “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. 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.”
Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, Inc., said it is a bit of an odd move for Google.
“Well, Google tries a lot of things, and has been trying to make its way in the enterprise with Google Apps, but this is aimed at a vertical — ecommerce vendors,” said Gottheil. “It does seem odd… It does not seem strategic to me.”
Google Commerce Search is a hosted service and is incorporated with Google’s Merchant Center and Product Search services. With Google Merchant Center — formally known as Google Base, online retailers submit their catalog data to be crawled by Google. Once crawled, their items show up on the Google Product search site, which is Google’s shopping search engine. Google Product is the company’s answer to sites like Shopping.com and Shopzilla.com. Users of Google Commerce Search engine will find their data automatically submitted to Merchant Center and appearing on Google Product Search.
Google Commerce Search will be priced starting at $50,000 per year and will be aimed at the top 1,000 online retailers in each country where Google operates, says Google Enterprise Search product manager, Nitin Mangtani.
“Retailers convinced me that there is a need for this type of product,” Mangtani said, adding that sluggish search performance on retail sites can send shoppers elsewhere and hurt a retailer’s sales conversion rates.
He also added that retailers can also save on infrastructure and maintenance costs since Google’s product is “cloud-based” — meaning the software is hosted inside Google’s own data centers instead of on a retailer’s computers.
Commerce Search is also incorporated with Google Analytics. However it does not include any credit toward, or usage of, Google’s main search results advertising spots AdWords, which allows businesses buy advertisements next to relevant search results. Nor does it integrate with or include credit toward AdSense, which places ads on a Web site.
Gartner analyst Van Baker said a recent survey by his group discovered that very few large Internet retailers plan to make any changes to their basic e-commerce technology.
“There is not a whole lot of evidence that they are looking to switch,” Baker said, speaking about e-commerce technology in general, and not about search functionality in particular.
Google’s Mangtani noted that the commerce search service is not only aimed for the handful of top-tier e-commerce companies, like Amazon.com Inc, most of which employ their own home-grown technology.
Google’s main search rival, Microsoft’s new Bing engine, has been making online shopping one of its top focuses. And while some would see Google Commerce Search as a way to ward off Bing’s e-commerce efforts, Google is going after the retailer, while Bing is going after the actual shopper.
“This may be an attempt to head off something they expect Microsoft to do,” added Gottheil.
Jim Murphy, an analyst with AMR Research, said this could be beneficial to e-tailers since many of them are dissatisfied with their product search capability.
“My awareness is that the very top retailers have solid search/e-commerce solutions, but there seems to be a lot of opportunity for mid-to-large retailers,” he added. “I see it as a fledgling product. It might serve as a make-shift solution for search-hungry retailers today, though proving it is worth it for this holiday season might be a challenge. But in Google’s typical style, I’m sure it will improve quickly over a short period of time.”
Beta tester Birkenstock USA has signed on to be one of the first public users. The company’s COO, Jeff Kilmer, asserts that the new search engine has given its site speedier searches, more relevant results and better customer satisfaction.
The commerce search product is the freshest example of Google’s venture in to expansion from Internet search and advertising-based businesses into technology products aimed at corporate customers.
This clip will give you a good idea of how it works: