Google on Thursday launched Commerce Search, a cloud-based enterprise search application for e-tailers that promises to improve sales conversion rates and simplify the online shopping experience for their customers.

The Google-hosted service leverages its extensive search technology to fill the gap between what online consumers have come to expect from a search engine and what e-tailers have thus far been able to deliver either from their homegrown search applications or those outsourced to third-party providers.

"There's a huge gap between customers' expectations and the actual technology that's available to retailers so far," Nitin Mangtani, lead product manager for Google's enterprise search group, told InternetNews.com. "That's why we are building and launching a product that's fully hosted in Google's cloud."

As with all things Google, integration and handy little technological nuances are at the core of this latest enterprise search tool.

Google will primarily compete with the likes of Microsoft's FAST and Autonomy in the customized e-tailing search engine market. Earlier this week, it rolled out Social Search, another endeavor that leverages its search dominance to personalize search queries made on social networking sites.

Along with the integration with the products and product descriptions previously sent through an application programming interface (API) to Google, e-tailers can now customize their Commerce Search APIs to highlight specific marketing campaigns and sales on their enterprise search page—essentially bringing the look and feel of a brick-and-mortar store's promotions to the Web site.

When it comes to online shopping, speed kills.

According to marketing research firm MarketingSherpa, online shoppers spend an average of eight seconds before deciding whether or not they'll stay on a given Web site and 43 percent of visitors to online retail sites say the first thing they do is type the product name or category into the site's search box to start their voyage.

LATEST NEWS

Microsoft's Dynamics ERP to Gain New Services
Barnes & Noble's e-Reader Nook Sold Out Already
Memory Market Due for Big Shift in 2010
Microsoft: No 'Back Door' in Windows 7
Tech's H-1B Hiring Faces 'Employ America Act'

"That's the main aspect of this product," Mangtani said. "We're providing a hosted solution that gives users ultra-fast results with all the features like spellchecker and built-in query stemming capabilities."

Mangtani said that with exception of maybe the top five or 10 e-tailers—think Amazon and eBay—most e-tailers' search engines take two or three seconds to respond to a query and often require customers to click on multiple links to narrow down their search and find the exact product or brand they're looking for.

"And from the retailers' perspective, they want to focus on branding and shipping and customer loyalty and inventory issues," he said. "They don't want to deal with the technology."

Commerce Search not only integrates the data submitted to Google's Product Center and Merchant Center but also ties into its popular Google Analytics application, giving e-tailers an opportunity to not only track customer behavior but the effectiveness of the customized search application.

Once an e-tailer has decided to give Commerce Search a shot, it uploads an API with all its product catalog, descriptions and customization requirements and then Google shoots back an API with those specifications that's installed on the Web site.

Google also offers a marketing and administration consultation to highlight a particular brand of camera or T-shirt that the retailer wants to prominently place on its now customized search results.

It also gives e-tailers full control to create their own merchandising rules so that it can, for example, always display Canon cameras at the top of its digital camera search results or list its latest seasonal items by descending price order.

Mangtani said Commerce Search pricing is dependent on the number of customer queries made but begins at $50,000 for an annual subscription. He said Birkenstock USA is already using the application in a live production environment and another 20 to 30 retailers are running beta versions of the product.