Gogle today launching Google Commerce Search 2.0 for retailers in the United States and United Kingdom. In seperate news, the company simlified the interface of Google Docs to make it easier to share and see who has access to your files.
Google Commerce Search 2.0
To help retail sites get ready for the summer shopping season, Google launched
Google Commerce Search 2.0 for retailers in the United States and United Kingdom. The new version of Google Commerce Search provides a better experience online for shoppers and greater control for retailers, Google said.
Google Commerce Search, first launched a little over six months ago, is an enterprise-grade website search solution hosted in Google?s cloud and designed specifically for online retailers. This second release includes a number of improvements:
- More merchant customization: Google introduced a full merchandising dashboard, which gives merchants more control over promotions, ranking rules and filtering. Marketers and product merchandisers can now do all of this themselves?no custom code necessary. New retailer controls like time-based promotions, navigation bar with filters, and simple product ranking rules mean seasonal optimizations can be done on the fly.
- Better shopper experience: With query autocompletion, retailers can offer common queries to shoppers in real time, as they type, without any custom coding. GCS is also faster and more relevant than before thanks to search quality improvements. Because it?s hosted in the Google cloud, search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second. gogole has also added spelling and stemming dictionaries and new custom synonym options to make shopping on a retail site as easy and accurate as searching on Google.com.
- Improved browsing and navigation: Many shoppers depend on the search bar on retail sites when they're looking to make a purchase, but some people will always prefer to navigate through different categories and discover new products. Now, Google Commerce Search allows visitors to shop by browsing around a site as well as searching directly for products.
Google Commerce Search 2.0 is available now. The pricing model for Google Commerce Search is based on the number of products/items (SKUs) in a retailer's catalog and the number of search queries entered on their site each year, Google said. Pricing starts at $25,000 per year.
Sharing Google Docs got easier
Google also today updated the interface of Google Docs
making it easier to share and see who has access to your files.
Documents, spreadsheets and presentations can now be identified as "Private," "Anyone with a link" or "Public on the web." As before, all docs start out as private by default.
* Private: Docs start out as private. When you first create a doc, you are the only person with access to it. From there, you can give access to other people.
* Anyone with the link: If you set your doc to "Anyone with the link," it?s like an unlisted phone number. In the same way that anyone who knows an unlisted phone number can call it, anyone who knows the web address or URL of that doc can view it.
* Public on the web allows anyone the ability to find and access that particular doc on the web. For example, you could create a flyer for a concert, save it as a public doc, post a link to it on your blog. Public docs are automatically indexed by search engines like Google, so they may appear in search results as well.
Other improvements that have started to roll out this week include:
- Visibility options for your docs now appear next to every doc title and in the docs list. You can see the full list of editors and viewers by clicking on the visibility option next to the doc?s title or on the Share button.
- Google also removed the three tab interface and replaced it with one dialog that lets you see who has access, manage access and invite others.
- For a doc set to anyone with a link, you can reset the doc's URL at anytime, which helps you better control who has access to your doc.
- You can now also modify the sharing settings of multiple docs at a time by selecting multiple docs and selecting Share > Sharing settings.
If you?re using Google Apps for your school or business,
read this post at Google's Enterprise Blog