• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 5, 2009

Google handed online retailers and ecommerce Web sites an early holiday gift in hopes of improving conversions and reducing bounce rates. On Thursday the Mountain View, Calif., company will introduce Google Commerce Search, a site search feature geared toward retail and ecommerce sites.

Commerce Search runs from Google's cloud computing platform, which allows companies to get up and running within days without interrupting operations. Retailers and ecommerce stores can set filters to customize the search experience based on customer needs, such as category, brand, price or size.

The Commerce Search API allows retailers to customize the search experience on their Web site. Special features, such as the ability to design the site for specific promotions, enable companies to control product placement on the page, from the top to the bottom of search results. The application offers automatic spell check, built-in query stemming, and advanced synonyms.

Birkenstock USA implemented Google's product site search about a week ago, so it's still in the early days when it comes to measuring its effectiveness, according to Martin Bell, ecommerce manager at Birkenstock. "The main things I like about it so far are speed, responsiveness, and increased amount of usability in the results," he says. "Before, we were using the Google Custom Search, which basically returns standard text results based on our domain, similar to the Google SERPs."

While great for a content site, the new search functionality really showcases Birkenstock products, pulling in images and product descriptions from a Google Base feed. This means that the retailer's products get right in front of customers. When Birkenstock created the site in May, the retailer considered building a proprietary search engine to go along with the custom-built ecommerce site -- but looking at the cost of Google Custom Search, it was a no-brainer for it to use the prebuilt version instead.

"Google's new product search is comparatively priced, and the cost is trivial compared with the resources needed to build and maintain our own search functionality, so I consider it already a great return," Bell says. "We're looking forward to this really increasing our conversion rates from search."

Nitin Mangtani, lead product manager of Enterprise Search at Google, says deploying a superior search technology can help retailers reduce maintance and costs, but also give consumers a better experience.

When shoppers land on a retail Web site, the merchant only has about eight seconds to convince the shopper to stay, according to Google.

Search technology at most retailers has not kept pace with end-user expectations, according to Mangtani. "It's been a barrier," he says. "You see it directly impacting ecommerce revenue."

Easily monitoring revenue streams means integrating with other Google products. Google Commerce Search ties into with Google tools, such as Google Product Search and Google Analytics. Retailers can measure changing conversion rates through Commerce Search integration with Google Analytics on their Web site. Merchants simply need to supply Google with one feed of their catalog items to power Google Commerce Search for their Web site store and for indexing on Google Product Search.

Forrester Analyst Leslie Owens believes the most innovative part of the service is that it's fully hosted, so it can handle all types of queries, from low to high traffic. She says Google will charge retailers by the number of queries processed -- a minimum of $50,000 annually. "Retailers are already sending Google their product information to be listed in the shopping section of the Google search engine," she says. "This takes it one step further to provide site search on the retailer's Web site."