Google Cloud announces general availability of Retail Search

Google Cloud’s Retail Search aims at providing retailers with Google-quality search capabilities on their own sites as part of the Google Cloud Discovery Solutions for Retail suite of products. Search abandonment is seen as major problem for retailers and Retail Search will offer an understanding of shopper intent and context based on established Google search technologies.

Why we care. Don’t confront the shopper with friction before they’ve even found the product and service they’re looking for. A survey commissioned by Google Cloud and conducted by The Harris Poll found that search abandonment could cost retailers $300 billion per year in the U.S. alone.

Traditional search based on keywords and Boolean logic may just not cut it when customers have become accustomed to high performance websites being able to understand and respond to more complex requests. Digital shopping creates great opportunities for brands — it also creates a high-risk environment when competitors offering more seamless experiences are just a click away and not, for example, in the next town.

Retail search capabilities. The specific capabilities of the offering include the following:

• Semantic search, looking beyond keywords to the context of the shopper’s query.
• Advanced query understanding, responsive to very broadly worded queries.
• Optimized results that match business goals such as the introduction of new products and promotions with the shopper’s intent.

Read next: How to build a search-first marketing strategy

Early adoption sees success. Retailers in a number of countries, including Lowe’s in the U.S., Fnac in France and Pernambucanas in Brazil have report early success. “We have been partnering with Google Cloud to give our customers relevant results for long-tail searches,” said Neelima Sharma, SVP, technology, e-commerce, marketing and merchandising at Lowe’s, “and have seen an increase in click-through and search conversion and a drop in our ‘No Results Found’ rate since we launched.”

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.