It will not have passed the notice of careful observers to Google's different Universal-Search-integrations that, at the moment, Google is trying out many different settings. Due to this,now, they are also giving attention to an area that they have not attached much value to in recent years: the Google Productsearch. Even though it started out under the name of „Froogle“ at the end of 2002, only now is Google using the possibilities and scope that the searchengine-giant has in this market. Here we have one of the new product-search-integrations as shown in the SERPs:


Google is not just displaying three or five shops that offer the queried product anymore, but will display a page from their productsearch instead. This site then sorts the different offers for the product by price – a classic price-comparison-function. It is interesting to see how Google is trying to enhance the displayed informations: they are summarizing and structuring web reviews for the merchants to be shown with the results. We have already seem this from hotel-reviews and it seems that they are using this method in this case, too.

It is going to be exciting to see how Google will proceed. I assume that they will also implement the adoption of reviews from third-party-websites like Ciao.de or Dooyoo.de for Products – this is a case where those informations are really helpful. While doing this, Google will not pay much heed to the sensitivities of the siteoperators involved. Those who are unhappy with this are free to bar the Googlebot (and thanks to the crawlcache, there is only one Googlebot left for a while now so that you are unable to make a case differentiation) via the robots.txt. Additionally, I believe that we will see the above boxes spread more widely. It will become unappealing for Google to link directly to the shops if they can strengthen their own products first. I also believe that, in the end, Google Checkout will make an entrance. Google's Paypal competitor enables them to integrate their very own shopping cart to the Google Productsearch through various (participating) merchants – probably including Performance-measuring and -billing.