Improvements to Product Search for this holiday season

Every year retailers start the holiday shopping season earlier and earlier—and still I procrastinate until late December before getting started. This year I've already made my list and I’m ready to go.

I usually get my holiday shopping done in two ways: online (e-commerce) and offline (“brick and mortar” stores). I’ve found that shopping online is best when you know what you're looking for—you can search for specific items, research multiple brands or compare reviews. On the other hand, shopping offline makes it easier to explore products in person and sometimes discover things that you didn’t know existed. Plus, it’s usually the only way to take your purchase home the same day.

The line between online and offline shopping is starting to blur: According to a study by Forrester while 93 percent of retail purchases today happen in a store, more than 46 percent of those in-store purchases are influenced by online research. Not to mention that shoppers can access the web from anywhere at anytime—including from their mobile phones when browsing the aisles of a local store.

All of this got our team thinking about how we could help further bridge the gap between online and offline shopping. This week, we’re introducing several new features to Product Search that start doing just that.

Local availability on Google Product Search: We’ve partnered with more than 70 retail brands—including national retailers like Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma, as well as software manufacturers like JDA, Epicor and Oracle—to connect shoppers searching online with local stores that have the items they’re are looking for in-stock. For example, if you’re looking online to get your son that new Wii video game he’s been wanting, you can click on the “nearby stores” link to see where it’s in stock nearby. (If you’re a retailer who’s interested in taking part, you can learn more on the Google Retail Blog.)

Google Shopper 1.3: Our mobile shopping app helps shoppers on the go research items and find the best place to buy them either online or in a nearby store—and it already has more than 2.5 million downloads. This version includes new search filters like “price” and “brand” to help refine your search. And, you’ll still get features like Local Availability, voice search and rapid continuous barcode scanning (so you can point your phone at a product and get information from the web).

“Popular products” and “aisles”: We’ve borrowed an idea from successful brick and mortar stores and in the coming weeks, we'll roll-out two features called “popular products” and “aisles” to help people learn about and discover new products. When you search for a category of products such as “camera lenses,” our new popular products feature helps you get started by showing you the lenses other people are viewing online. “Aisles” helps you browse and discover products by organizing results into sub-categories that others have found helpful. For example, if you’re looking for a new TV, you can choose between display types like LCD and plasma. If you’re interested in camera lenses for that brand new SLR, you can shop by the aperture of the lens.


We hope these features make it easier for you to get your shopping done this holiday season—whether it’s online, offline or in the new space in between.

Happy shopping!

Google Removes 3 Advanced Search Options

Google has recently removed three useful options from the advanced search sidebar. You can longer restrict the results to shopping-related pages or remove shopping sites from the results.

Another option that has been removed is page previews, which displayed a longer snippet and a thumbnail for each search result. This feature has been replaced by Instant Preview, but you can no longer see all the thumbnails next to the search results.

When Google launched the sidebar, back in May 2009, it was the first time when powerful features like restricting the results to recent pages didn't require to visit the advanced search page. "We think of the Search Options panel as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future."

This week in search 11/12/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

We’re always excited by the diversity of the search features and enhancements that we make in any given week. Each week we try to release a diverse set of search feature and enhancement to help you find what you’re looking for, faster. From getting sports information instantly, to making it even easier for you to find the right webpage, this week’s round up includes a slew of new changes.

NHL Live Result

Many of you are sports fans, and we’re always delighted to make improvements that help you find those scores, stats and recaps. We partnered with our friends at NHL.com to provide rich information in the snippets of the NHL.com results. These include real-time scores, schedules and team standings. They also include links for quick access to game previews, live streams, recaps and video highlights of completed games making it super-easy to keep up to date on the latest NHL action.

Example searches: [nhl], [rangers]

Help for those who need it

In times of crisis, it's especially important to find the crucial information you're looking for—and find it fast. After receiving positive feedback for poison control and suicide prevention special search features in the U.S., this week we launched one or more emergency search features in 13 countries: Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. For certain queries, the feature displays the phone number to call for poison emergencies, suicide prevention or general emergency services.

Instant Previews

This week we were excited to take the speed of Google Instant even further with the launch of Instant Previews in almost all languages and domains. Instant Previews is a new, interactive feature that helps you select the right results by showing you a preview of each page and highlighting the most relevant sections for your query. You can activate the feature with a single click on the magnifying glass next to the result title. The tool is fast and interactive, with the average preview appearing in under a tenth of a second.

Learn more about Instant Previews here.

We hope you enjoyed this week’s updates. You can check out some of the top searches of the week on our latest edition of Google Beat—stay tuned for more!

Gmail's Context-Sensitive Help Link

If you click on Gmail's "Help" link at the top of the page, you'll be sent to an appropriate section from the Gmail Help Center. Instead of always linking to the help center's homepage, Gmail links to the priority inbox section if you're using Gmail's smarter inbox, it shows the articles about filters if you're trying to create a filter and the articles about contacts if you're using Gmail's contact manager.

It's a small change that makes it easy to find useful information about the Gmail feature you're currently without having to type a query. Hopefully, Google will add this feature to other services, just like the interactive bug reporting tool, which is now available in Gmail, YouTube and AdSense.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Instant Previews

You don't need to use your mouse to enable Google's visual previews for search results. Just press the right arrow key to show a small screen shot for the currently selected search result. You can navigate using the up/down arrow keys to highlight a different result and use the left arrow key to hide the previews.

Google Instant Previews can't be disabled from the settings page and, despite having a similar name, it's not related to Google Instant. If you disable Google Instant, you'll still see the magnifying glasses next to the search results, but the keyboard shortcuts are no longer available.

This feature is not yet available to everyone, but you can try it using this special page or by adding &esrch=instantpreviews to the URL of a search results page.

New Gmail Themes

There are many Gmail themes to choose from, but few of them are actually usable. Gmail added 5 new themes: Basic Black, Basic White, Tree Tops, Marker and Android.

Even if you're not an Android fan or you don't have an Android phone, you should really try the Android theme. It's simple, stylish and you can still read your messages.

If you're looking for a minimalist theme, Basic White is a good alternative to Minimalist, an already existing theme. It looks a little bit unfinished, but Google says it's the Gmail interface stripped "to the bare bones".

Gmail Tests Call Recording

Andrew Banchich spotted a new Gmail feature that lets you record calls. I don't see the call record button in my account, so it's probably an experimental feature that's not yet widely available.

It's similar to the call recording feature from Google Voice. "In order to record your call, simply press 4. You can do it when you first accept a call, or any time after it's started. To stop the recording, press 4 again or hang up. Your recordings are saved online and you can access them just like you do with voicemail." Instead of pressing 4, you click the record button.