Google launches enterprise search product for retail and e-commerce
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Bangalore: Google has launched Commerce Search, a hosted enterprise search product for the online retail stores and e-commerce websites, reports TechCrunch. The search giant offers a general hosted search product that is used by organizations who want to add customized Google search function on their websites. Google is now entering the vertical space, by the first enterprise product with retail optimized space. Among the key components, Google promises "ultra-fast speed and accuracy" by putting Google's search technology to provide a fast response time to customer searches on retail sites. Commerce Search also uses a proprietary ranking technology to analyze the products in each data feed and serve the most relevant match. According to Google, the faster search speed will help increase conversions to buy products, as customers can quickly find specific products without having to navigate complex search interfaces. The Google Commerce offers features such as parametric search, sorting of results, spell checker, stemming, and synonym suggestion, which let users to refine and target their searches. The search uses several proprietary signals to determine the ranking of search result. Commerce Search also offers a compelling product promotions feature, which allows the retailers to fine-tune search results to push promoted products to the top of results. The interface allows for retailers to specifically label products as promoted. Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search said, "Google Commerce Search API allows retailers to fully customize the search experience on their website and add all the bells and whistles they need to make the interface match the rest of their site. And, retailers using Commerce Search don't need to show the Google logo on the search site." As the product is hosted by Google and based in the cloud, the company says it's easily scalable to absorb additional traction on the site. For example, during the holiday season, retailers will most probably experience high traffic on search. Google will ensure that retailers can manage the boost in traffic and scale the search application. Google promises integration with other Google products such as Google Analytics and Google Product Search. The retailers can measure clicks, conversion rates, number of transactions, average order value and other data through Google Analytics. The e-commerce vendors can provide a single feed of products and catalogue items that will power Commerce and indexing of products on Google Product Search. The search giant did not provide any information on pricing, but a spokeswoman stated that the product will start at $50,000 per year. Beyond that, pricing will be based on the number of products in the customer's database and the number of search queries made on their site each year. With the product, Google is making an aggressive move in the retail space. Google Product has not really taken off, but Commerce is expected to affect the use of Google Product.

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