Users can share shopping search results in order to ask for a friend’s opinion while shopping online. The sharing options are visible only on the product reviews page, which can be reached by clicking on the “User Reviews” link on the Shopping search results.

Social sharing links on Bing Shopping

Sharing is enabled through Facebook and Twitter. Users can share the shopping search results by clicking on the Facebook, Twitter or email link and then typing any questions about the product.

Some question the utility of such a feature. Twitter users might not want all their followers to see their shopping-related queries. They might also not appreciate receiving advice and opinions from several of those followers or other advertisers with automated tweets set to respond to such shopping tweets.

Proponents of social search have always used the argument that the ability to get a friend or trusted person’s opinion before buying something would be invaluable. This new feature by Bing makes that argument a reality.

Neither Google nor Yahoo! currently offer users the option to share shopping search results. Microsoft might have yet another winner on their hands… if only more people would actually use Bing’s shopping search!

In addition to traditional sponsored links, users will soon be able to view lists of targeted products, retailers offering those products, their prices and a product image when they search for shopping related terms on Google.

The best part of this ad format is that it is based on a Cost-Per-Action (CPA) pricing model. This means that the merchant only has to pay Google when a user clicks on his ad and completes a purchase on the site.

Product Listing Ads will be especially useful to merchants selling a large variety of products. Advertisers don’t actually need to create any additional ad text or keywords.

Whenever a user enters a search query relevant to an item in an advertiser’s Google Merchant Center account, Google will automatically show the most relevant products along with the associated image, price and product name.

While this new system would make it very easy for merchants to advertise all their products on Google, it could also take control away from the advertiser. Google has not currently specified any details about how participating retailers will be able to specify CPA bids or exclude certain products from being included in Listing Ads.

The service is in beta at present, but will gradually be made available to more and more advertisers. The launch has been timed to gain popularity very quickly, with the approach of the holiday shopping season.

According to the report released by comScore for the month of November 2008, Google has taken a gigantic leap forward by registering 11.8 million unique visitors on the Google Shopping site, in that month alone. This represents a growth of an almost unbelievable 786% compared to the same month last year.

This is the largest one-year increase seen by any online comparison shopping service.

As of now, Yahoo! Shopping search continues to remain the number one shopping search site, as it has been for the last few years. However, it registered 27.6 million unique visitors in November 2008, which is not a very impressive gain, compared to their own figures for the same month last year.

At present, Google is ranked at number five in this arena, but they are certainly moving forward, and once the results for the Christmas shopping season are out they may have further consolidated their position.

Jerry Dischler, Group Project Manager for Google Product Search says, “we have made a number of changes to improve both the relevance and the quality of products that are displayed, to reduce erroneous entries and display popular products (making the site) easier for consumers to understand and more useful.”

While they have definitely already achieved a lot with Google Product Search, it continues to remain one of their lower priorities, and hence one can only wonder at the possibilities of growth for their high priority platforms such as Gmail and Chrome.

Google Base is the service that feeds into Google Product Search. It is a space where sellers can fill in all the information about the products they are selling, which Google will then display to potential buyers. Some of the commonly listed items in Google Product Search are household supplies, electrical and electronic goods, books, vehicles, vacation rentals and even jobs.
With the number of products being marketed through Google increasing at a very fast pace, it is extremely difficult for buyers to select the right product. It is equally difficult for sellers to bring their product to the notice of buyers.

Vendors can use this new feature, which has been added by Google to all Google Base Accounts, to diagnose the quality and hence the approximate position that their products would be placed in on Google Product Search.

When a product is described well, that is, its features and benefits are highlighted in the item list, it is bound to catch the eye of the buyer, over a product that may be equally good but is not presented well. This is the principle on which suggestions are made in the ‘Data Quality’ tab.

Some of the suggestions provided by the data quality tab are to upload a photograph of the items in the feed, or to improve the title of the product feed.

Product Marketing Manager, Jessica Ng says, “We’ve always emphasized the importance of submitting high-quality product feeds to Google Product Search. This means submitting accurate, up-to-date product information in the form of attributes, as well as abiding by best practices for formatting these attributes. Doing so goes a long way toward helping shoppers find your items more easily.”

A range of popular products, their user ratings and price comparisons will be made available to users whenever and wherever they needs them, via Mobile Live Search. Detailed reviews and consumer opinions will also be available, allowing the user to thoroughly research the product before buying it.

Feature ratings through consumer reviews from across the web will be incorporated into the Live Search product listings. Henceforth, whenever consumers notice a new product in a store, they can use the Microsoft service to find out details about its performance, special features, compare it with similar products and also search for better prices before actually buying it on the spot.

Another interesting feature of Live’s Mobile Search offering will be made available to users in the U.K. and Japan – the ability to automatically pinpoint one’s location, based on the nearest mobile communication towers. Customers can then locate whatever they are searching for in the vicinity. However, the service currently works only on Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile’s networks.

Product search on mobile has been available on Google since September of last year. Microsoft’s service is not yet actually available in the Europe, as of the time of writing this story. However, the Mobile Live Search team will probably roll it out in time, a fact they have not considered important enough to mention in their announcement.

Product Search For Mobile can currently only be accessed via Google Labs, the incubator for all of Google’s new technologies and services. While products and services in Google Labs are still in beta, they are usually in very good working order, and often extremely popular. The mobile product search offering currently shares a home with the likes of Google Transit, Google Trends, Google Page Creator and Google suggest.

http://labs.google.com/intl/uk/productswml.html

The new service allows mobile Internet users to search for a product via an extremely simple interface from any handheld device that supports WML (WAP 1.2). Product Search For Mobile results show prices, model numbers, product names and store names for five products at a time. The results can be sorted by price or by best match, as seen in the screen shots below:

However, the current service does not allow users to do anything other than browse listings. It is extremely likely, though, that as the service develops, users will be able to view product details, and even purchase the product from their mobile phone using yet another Google service that was discussed not too long ago – GPay, a phone-based payment service.