When Google sets its sites upon a particular goal, they can really go all out to achieve it. Their product search engine, which was lagging way behind in the market has suddenly picked up steam and is fast closing in on its competitors.
According to the report released by comScore for the month of November 2008, Google has taken a gigantic leap forward by registering 11.8 million unique visitors on the Google Shopping site, in that month alone. This represents a growth of an almost unbelievable 786% compared to the same month last year.
This is the largest one-year increase seen by any online comparison shopping service.
As of now, Yahoo! Shopping search continues to remain the number one shopping search site, as it has been for the last few years. However, it registered 27.6 million unique visitors in November 2008, which is not a very impressive gain, compared to their own figures for the same month last year.
At present, Google is ranked at number five in this arena, but they are certainly moving forward, and once the results for the Christmas shopping season are out they may have further consolidated their position.
Jerry Dischler, Group Project Manager for Google Product Search says, “we have made a number of changes to improve both the relevance and the quality of products that are displayed, to reduce erroneous entries and display popular products (making the site) easier for consumers to understand and more useful.”
While they have definitely already achieved a lot with Google Product Search, it continues to remain one of their lower priorities, and hence one can only wonder at the possibilities of growth for their high priority platforms such as Gmail and Chrome.
