Google's new search engine expected to help boost commerce

Google launched Google Commerce Search, a new hosted enterprise search product that the company says let customers find products fast and can boost conversion rates from online shopping. The internet search giant says it realised that search methods used for e-commerce have been a barrier to growth in the past 10 years and hopes that Google Commerce Search will help to improve businesses.

"The average online retailer conversion rate is just three percent," the company said, "but could potentially be five to 10 times higher" by improving the shopping experience for consumers and the conversion rate for retailers.

The product can be implemented and scaled up fairly quickly, since it is cloud-based. Scaling can be an issue for retailers, particularly with the upcoming Christmas holiday season, where spikes in traffic are hard to predict. David Girouard, president of Google Enterprise believes the launch of Google Commerce Search comes just in time for the holidays.

Laura DiDio, an analyst for industry research firm Information Technology Intelligence Corp., said Google is taking retail-site searches "to a new level." For instance, she said, by using Commerce Search, a retailer's product inventory gets submitted to Product Search and feature that proves to be a big value-add to the enterprise search product.

Google says Commerce Search uses proprietary ranking technology to analyze products and provide "the most relevant match" for faster and more accurate searches.