Google Introduces Retail Search For Ecommerce Sites

A new tool for ecommerce stores brings Google technology to on-site search, helping shoppers find more relevant results.

Built with Google’s technologies that understand context and user intent, it is intended to help businesses improve on-site search and overall shopping experience.

A survey conducted by The Harris Polls and Google Cloud found bad online experiences cost U.S. retailers $300 billion each year, with 76% percent of consumers reporting unsuccessful searches caused them to forgo purchases from retail websites.

Retail Search hopes to address both sides of this issue, minimize search abandonment, and encouraging sales by improving customer experiences.

In its ongoing mission of providing users with better search results, Google’s search algorithms are constantly updated to better understand user intent and return relevant results faster. Retail Search applies this principle to the shopping experience.

Google’s state-of-the-art artificial intelligence gives Retail Search advanced query understanding produces better product search results and recommendations, even from broad queries.

Fully managed and customizable, Retail Search allows organizations to create shopper focused search experiences. Building upon the search engine’s indexing, retrieval and ranking, it seeks to make product discovery easier for shoppers, while optimizing business goals for retailers.

Merchants can apply business rules to fine-tune what customers see, diversify product displays, filter by availability and add custom tags, as they see fit. This allows them to drive desired outcomes for engagement, revenue or conversions.

Capabilities include:

Retail Search is the latest addition to Google Cloud’s Product Discovery Solutions, a collection of tools designed to increase retail operational efficiency, streamline digital shopping experiences, and address shifting consumer preferences.

It is an outgrowth from Google’s internal media teams’ continuous analysis of the retail market and commitment to innovation, as they seek to find new way to help businesses maximize outcomes in a shifting digital landscape.

It joins current Google Cloud offerings Vision Product Search, which uses machine learning-powered object recognition and lookup to provide similar or complementary items from product catalogs and Recommendations AI, which delivers relevant product recommendations to drive engagement across channels.

The entire suite allows ecommerce property owners to integrate data, manage models and monitor performance through a graphical interface. It integrates into existing tools, including Google Analytics 360, Tag Manager and BigQuery.