Enhancing the shopping experience on Google Product Search

[cross-posted on the Google Commerce Blog]

Shortly after joining Google from Like.com, my team and I developed and launched Boutiques -- a fashion website offering women new ways to browse and shop for apparel. Today, we’re taking the features that shoppers absolutely love from Boutiques and incorporating them into Google Product Search -- so millions of people can use them every day. This is the first in a series of improvements we’re making to Google Product Search leveraging the computer vision and machine learning technology developed by the team we affectionately call our fashion and computer nerds. We hope you’ll enjoy what’s new today, and what’s around the corner for the upcoming holiday season. A 

Redesigned Homepage The first thing you’ll probably notice is our new homepage. This new look and feel is designed to inspire and facilitate easy, enjoyable browsing and shopping.

Better Ways to Shop, Starting with Dresses

By increasing the size of each image, simplifying much of the text around the images, and lightening the text color, we’ve emphasized the more visual aspects of apparel shopping. We’ve also integrated the most popular search refinements from Boutiques. Using the same innovative machine learning and computer vision technologies we developed for Boutiques, you can now browse dress collections that match the color, silhouette and genre you desire.

Explore visually similar styles
And because we think browsing and discovering new items is what makes shopping fun, we’ve added a feature to Product Search that makes it easy to do just that. Let’s say a particular dress catches your eye. Now, you can explore similar styles and discover new designers by clicking on that dress and viewing dozens of visually similar ones. We think you’ll find this fun --and addictive!-- and we hope it brings that element of surprise and discovery we all love with brick-and-mortar shopping to the online shopping experience.

An update on Boutiques.com and related properties
As we continue to integrate technology and lessons learned from Boutiques.com into Google Product Search, we will be redirecting shoppers from Boutiques.com to Google Product Search. The former Like.com team, alongside the Google Product Search team, will drive new ideas for apparel shopping through one unified product. The team is excited to be a part of the shopping experience on Google and have our work displayed to millions of users every day.  

If you’re a user of Boutiques.com and other Like.com websites, you’ll soon receive an email with instructions for saving your data before those websites are transitioned on October 14. If you have any questions please email us at boutiques-feedback@google.com. 

Like other teams that have joined Google, we’re thrilled with the opportunity to showcase our experience and technology to all of Google’s shoppers.

Posted by Burak Gokturk, Like.com Co-Founder and member of the Google Commerce team