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Google has made a few changes for its Product Search shopping engine, which has even led to closing down of Boutiques.com. The redesigning has made a number of changes, especially for the Shopping homepage. This now gives a look and feel which is specifically designed to “inspire and facilitate easy, enjoyable browsing and shopping.” For those, who look out for a dress from this shopping search engine, the option gives a shopper an option to browse through the dress collections based on matching color, silhouette and genre with technology based on machine learning and computer vision.
The Product Search Shopping engine has its basis on a technology, which has been developed by Like.com. Google bought Like.com last year from Munjal Shah, who founded Like.com. Apart from this, Shah has even been the founder of eBay tools provider Andale.com a decade ago.
Google intends to add features from Like.com’s Boutiques fashion website, which in fact is on the prime list in the series of Google Product Search improvements. This would thus even leverage computer vision and machine learning technology.
Google might have known that there would be some confusion in the minds on the users who intend to use this shopping search engine as well as those who have been in use of Boutiques.com. To make it clear, there was an example posted. It stated, “Let’s say a particular dress catches your eye. Now, you can explore similar styles and discover new designers by clicking on that dress and viewing dozens of visually similar ones. We think you’ll find this fun – and addictive! – and we hope it brings that element of surprise and discovery we all love with brick-and-mortar shopping to the online shopping experience.”
For those who shop on Boutiques.com, their next visit would direct them to Google Product Search and there was a warning from Google which asked users to save their data before the October 14th transition.
Google Product Search Service is still in its beta stage, but its strange that its not yet in for the UK market. Matt McGee of Searchengineland has appreciated the features and called it very un-googley (or indeed stylish). However, he did note that as far as SEO is concerned, this service would not be compatible with the best practices as they Google has opted to use big images and the usage of text is scarce. Google definitely had notified earlier in its commerce blog that they would be redesigning deeper pages as that they reflect the importance of everything visual.
Talking about the additional updates, it would include features like exploring visually similar styles and a machine learning and computer vision technology, which have
been popularly noted on Boutiques.com.
Boutiques.com was launched last year as a prototype, giving users an amazing ability to make a defined search in the field. But to no one’s avail, the experiment seems to have concluded and one would now see the closure of the same. Along with it, other Like.com properties would even be axed.