Google continued to expand its activities in the shopping and e-commerce sectors in the past weeks and month. It seems as if they are no longer content with purely being a broker between searchers and online-shops but that they would rather have a larger piece of the pie themselves. For this, they redid the Google Commerce Search for example. Version 2.0 of the internal search especially for online-shops has some new features under its belt and costs only half of what it used to. This should increase circulation and score important data for Google. At Google Products, former Froogle, there are also exciting changes: While the amount of searches with a Google Shopping-integration only went up slightly, as can be seen in this diagram; the type of integration is becoming increasingly different: in the past they contained direct links to the shops, while now, many of the links will be deeplinks to the Google Products detail-page. This is where Google build a full fledged price-comparison-servince over the past few month, complete with product-summaries, scraped user-impressions and the prices from participating shops. This is also where they are now starting to move their universal-search-integrations for nearly all high-traffic keywords to., which can already be marveled at in the USA.
Not nice? If we believe Sameer Samats (productmanager) statements in a current article on CNET, then this will only be the beginning. They managed to build the largest and most complete product-catalog in the world, thanks to the help of more than 100.000 shop-operators, all of which are submitting their current prices and product-details on a daily basis. Though at the moment, this only helps if the users already knows what they want to buy. Right now Google is thinking about a way to make shopping less of a task and more of an experience, to get customers to bind them selves closer to Google. Right now, they already offer an Android app, which lets a user scan a products barcode to get more details. Google is also offering a perimeter search for cell phones, which lets you find shops around you that carry a certain product. For the future, Google is planning the personalization: When it comes to shopping, Google wants to move away from just search and find a way to recommend users new, fitting products. I excited to see how the new Google Products and the lively discussion with data-protection-agencies will play out.
