Google Overhauls Product Search, Plans To Close Boutiques.com

Google’s new Product Search home page is very un-Googley. Dare I say that it actually looks … stylish?

It’s dominated by an oversized image area that changes through a series of five different products. There are short text descriptions for each on the left of the images, and then a couple rows of featured products below the fold. It looks like an actual major department store website.

(Mind you, there’s extremely little text on the page, so if you’re an online retailer, this would not be considered “best practices” when it comes to retail SEO. But it’s certainly much prettier than most Google product home pages, for what it’s worth.)

But that’s just one change. Google also explains that deeper pages are being redesigned, too. It begins with the apparel category, where images are larger and new options such as searching by color, silhouette and genre are available. There’s also a a “visually similar” search that will show apparel from other designers that closely resemble an item that the searcher is viewing.

Google says that these changes mirror what’s available on the Boutiques.com shopping site that Google launched almost a year ago. In fact, the company says it’s planning to close Boutiques.com as of October 14 and redirect shoppers to the new Google Product Search. Users of Boutiques.com should get an email soon with details about saving data before the switch takes place.

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Google: Product Search | Top News

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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http://www.gravytrain.co.uk Matthew Read

I think someone at Google likes the look of ASOS! Definitely a step away from their usual styling but I must say I think it looks pretty good!
Angelina Foster

Looks like some good changes. I’m looking forward to the ‘visually similar’ search as I’m always after some fashion inspiration!
http://blog.cpcstrategy.com Andrew Davis

I’m guessing women are enjoying the user experience of the new Google Product Search more than the men that I work with are.

Will the end result mean more sales for apparel merchants? Hopefully!
http://www.zenwebsolutions.com ZWS

Sometimes it amazes me how quickly Google can chop and change, one minute they’re launching boutiques.com, the next minute they close it. I suppose they have plenty of money to be able to try something of that scale and pull it if they feel it’s not the way they want to go. I think improving the product search page is a really good idea. If they can make it a real proposition, somewhere regular web users will go to instinctively when lookin to buy, then it’ll make submitting a google merchant feed even more valuable. Maybe it’d even become something people would pay for?