Dive Brief:
- Google is
augmenting its Image Search capabilities through Android apps and the
mobile web with a new “Similar Items” feature that
helps users find products similar to those they see in searched photos.
- Google
Image Search accomplishes this by using machine vision technology, a form
of machine learning that identifies products in lifestyle images and
displays matching items to the user. The Similar Items feature currently
allows search results related to handbags, sunglasses and shoes, and will
cover other apparel and home and garden categories in the next few months.
- Retailers
and merchants wanting to leverage the new feature need to add and maintain
schema.org product metadata on their web pages, according to the Google
Webmaster Central blog. Schema.org/Product markup helps Google find
product offerings on the web and give users an at-a-glance summary of
product info.
Dive Insight:
As search technology innovations go, image
search (or visual search) has drawn a lot of attention and innovation over the
last year or so. And though it recent has seemed like voice search could steal the spotlight away,
this announcement by Google is evidence that search technology players are
still exploring what they can accomplish within the borders of a photo.
It's not surprising that Google has been
pushing the envelope as much as anyone. Over the last year or so, the company
has made several announcements related to new Image Search capabilities. Last
May, Google enabled related shopping ads to appear as
users browsed image search results, and last summer, it launched an offering
for product companies to have ads for their specific products appear in results for broadly-termed search queries.
Late last year, Google also acquired hot image search startup Undecidable Labs.
It's not clear if that company's technology is helping fuel the Similar Items
feature, or if this new feature was already in development using other in-house
technology, but that acquisition suggested Google was more than willing to go
outside of its own organization to find new image search technology it believed
in.
Similar Items and similar image search
features should go quite a ways to endearing merchants to Google. While Google
is, without argument, an internet search pioneer, search technology evolutions
have left the door open for companies like Amazon and Pinterest to play a huge role in shopping
searches. For Google to stay in the shopping search conversation among among
merchants and consumers, it must continue innovating along the lines of Similar
Items.
#Mobilemarketing #Application
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