Google to start charging companies for listings
June 1, 2012 12:16 am
By Richard Waters in San
Francisco
Google is to start
charging companies for listing their products in a core part of its search
service, the first time it has converted a free section of its giant online
index into a purely commercial venture.
The change to Google
Product Search will mean that many merchants that have relied on the search
engine to lure potential customers online will face higher costs, according to
analysts.
The move also raises the
prospect that Google will eventually replace other parts of its free listings
with adverts, said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land. “It represents
an attitude that they’re no longer going to go out and gather stuff up for
free,” he said.
Google said it was making
the switch to enable it to show users higher quality results when they are
looking for products online. It also said the service would be relabelled as a
“sponsored” venture to show it was now based on advertising.
The change in direction
brings an end to a 10-year-old experiment in which Google tried to filter
information about products from the Web and make it available through a
separate panel on its results pages. When it launched the service, first known
as Froogle, the company said that not charging merchants to list items would
give internet users “confidence that the results we provide are relevant and
unbiased”.
On Thursday, however,
Google said that after a transitional period, only merchants who pay will be
able to have their products appear in the service, now called Google Shopping.
Its algorithms will sort through commercial listings and select which to show
using a formula based on relevance and the amount of money the advertisers are
prepared to pay.
Google sought to depict
product search as separate from typical web search and as an area that could be
improved by making it commercial. Information about many products is not
available on the web and is often supplied directly by merchants, requiring
“deeper relationships” with them, Sameer Samat, product manager for Google
Shopping, wrote in a blog post announcing the news.
“We believe that having a
commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their
product information fresh and up to date,” he added.
Similar arguments could be
made about other areas of information that Google presently indexes free of
charge, raising the possibility that more parts of its service will eventually
be replaced by advertising, Mr Sullivan said. These include Google Places, the
company’s local listings service, which relies partly on information supplied
by restaurants, stores and other providers of local services. Google refused to
comment on its future plans.
Comments
Post a Comment