New York — Soon before Christmas traffic statistics start pouring in; it is amazingly a rare occasion when we stumble upon news of this height, especially, even without those numbers, Google’s Product Search engine is reportedly catching up with big time rivals in the comparison shopping market instead of leading ahead of them.
Well, if we look at comScore’s November data on the comparison shopping market wherein Google’s Product Search managed to post a growth of 786% in November 2008 as compared to last year dismal performance — the biggest one-year increase by far of any online comparison shopping service, says market tracker comScore. An astounding growth extending through November has the service putting its rivals to shame.
And for the moment now, Yahoo has got something to boast about its Yahoo Shopping Search since it has been topping the market for quite some time now.
Yahoo’s Shopping Comparison site managed to attract around 27.6 million unique visitors in November 2008 which may not be a huge increase from the same period last year, but enough for Yahoo Shopping to have gained the number one spot in comScore’s survey of comparison shopping. Google is still at no. 5 but it is certainly moving upwards as quickly as it possibly can.
Jerry Dischler, group project manager for Google Product Search said:
“We have induced a number of changes to improve both the relevance and the quality of products that are displayed, to reduce erroneous entries and display popular products (making the site) easier for consumers to understand and make it more useful.”
According to comScore, Google Product Search gained 11.8 million unique visitors in November 2008 alone. This achievement speaks a lot about what Google can accomplish when it focuses a little energy on something.
Furthermore, Google Product Search is one of the search giant’s least promoted services, either, which indicates to all sorts of bright possibilities for things like Gmail and Chrome. Still, Google Product Search has a ways to go until it can claim true victory.
Meanwhile, Google has silently, rolled out a Product Ideas Blog. A related effort is the company’s solicitation of ideas and their prioritization from users in a voting area.
The introduction of the Product Ideas Blog and related voting is certainly not a coincidence as Google reportedly cuts back on under-performing products and its “20 percent time” initiatives, which generated many Google products in the past. Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted in the WSJ not long ago:
The company will restrain the “dark matter,” he says, projects that “have not really caught on” and “are not really that exciting.” He says the company is “not going to give” an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore. “When the cycle comes back,” he says, “we will be able to fund his brilliant vision.”