What you need to know
- Google wants to help online shoppers deal with the plethora of choices they have by aggregating products from different sites in one place.
- A new 'popular products' section in search results will now list the most successful clothing items across the web.
- The inline widget also includes options for filtering results and includes reviews scraped from the different stores carrying the item.
Google wants to help move your New Year's shopping along. In a world with thousands of online stores, it's hard to make sense of all that choice, and that's where Google wants to pitch in. Alongside indexing web pages, the company has now started indexing the individual clothing options found on as many as a million online stores.
What that means is that when you search for a cool jacket for your next party, instead of just throwing you Amazon's way, the search results will now show the most popular jackets from across the web, complete with smiling models, pricing, and everything. In addition, the 'popular products' widget includes options for quick filtering based on style, gender, or size.
If you just can't make up your mind, clicking on a product will also show more images of that floral dress or plaid shirt, along with a rating and a selection of reviews for the piece of clothing.
For the bargain hunters among us, Google will also list all the stores that sell the item as well as their pricing for it, ensuring you always get the best deal.
Clothing items will start showing up among search results starting this week — and the company hopes to start including more types of products in the future. As with its indexing of websites, the service is completely free for retailers, and they don't need to opt-in. However, the company does have a list of best practices for retailers to ensure their products get the best coverage possible. Who knows, maybe it'll even lead to a new front in online marketing, that of shopping index optimization.
