Google Looks to Expand Checkout Use
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With the holiday shopping season as a backdrop, Google is aiming to increase the visibility of its Google Checkout service by offering promotions to consumers who use it. Beginning on "Cyber Monday," November 27, discounts would be provided by participating merchants.
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Google Inc.  is spinning  off mounds of cash from operations, but Chief Executive Eric  Schmidt appeared to rule out seeking big mergers or making  other dramatic changes in how the company uses cash.
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Google Inc. has bought digital map maker Keyhole, extending the search engine with a toolbox that can catalog almost anything in the world.
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Last June, Google launched a service offering a one-click method of paying for purchases that minimizes the risk of credit card information being stolen off a Web site.
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ZDNet&#8217;s resident Google expert Garett Rogers writes that Google Checkout has expanded outside of the United States and into other countries. At least half of Google&#8217;s Checkout service has been opened up to countries other than the United States.  Now, regardless of where you live, you can purchase items with Google Checkout &#8212; unfortunately, finding [...]
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(InfoWorld) - Google is ramping up its efforts to help specific vertical markets create more effective online advertising using its technology to help clients highlight as many of their assets as possible to drive not only online but also offline sales. At its New York office Thursday, the directors of Google's vertical industry practices discussed some of the ways Google is changing its advertising strategies to be more industry-specific, something that the company hasn't traditionally done, said Tim Armstrong, president of advertising and commerce, North America, for Google. Armstrong said Google wants its advertising practices to be so vertical-specific that in the future, the specialists in those markets will be driving the company's advertising strategy --Â so much so that he joked the he would be out of a job. "The vertical people will be running Google," Armstrong said. "I'll be the least useful person in the room.... If you were to come into Google for a day, you'd actually see the industry groups have become the most specific connection point with customer." Most companies don't have a quantitative view of all of the assets they have for sale, and part of what Google is helping vertical industry customers do is take stock of all of their offerings so they create better ways to constantly reach customers, he said. As part of this strategy, Google's retail advertising practice is working on new technology that will help companies in that space assess all of the resources on their Web sites so they can more carefully choose keywords for targeted advertising. Currently, Google is working internally with customers to help them do this, but the company is still handing hard-copy results to customers, said John McAteer, director of Google's retail practice. In the future, however, Google wants to provide an automated way to crawl and index an entire Web site so companies can electronically compile all of its assets and generate keywords on their own, he said. Eventually, Google will offer the technology as a public tool, similar to one it already includes in its AdWords platform that helps customers crawl their Web sites to come up with relevant keywords for ads, said Brett Goffin, industry sales manager at Google. Neither McAteer nor Goffin could provide a time frame for when this tool would be made available. As part of a presentation Thursday, McAteer and Goffin outlined a case study in which Google teamed up with Rooms to Go Furniture, a company whose top executive was skeptical that online advertising could drive offline sales. Google worked with the furniture company to place online banner ads in local markets, targeting several U.S. metropolitan areas to drive customers to local stores. When the campaign was over, Rooms to Go saw a return of more than seven times its investment, and customer average order size 20 percent larger than the retailer's average sale. Moreover, retail stores accounted for 86 percent of sales, while only 14 percent came from e-commerce sales, McAteer said. In addition to its retail work, Google also has been doing market research to help other verticals, such as the automotive industry. The company's automotive market team plans to hold a Webinar on Oct. 11 to reveal the results of a study it conducted with Compete Inc. to discover buying habits of customers in the automotive space. Bonita Coleman Stewart, Google's industry director for automotive, said the two companies found that the time to market for automotive shoppers has shortened to one month, reducing the amount of time companies in this market have to reach customers with campaigns. She said that Google has not identified how it will use this information to serve its advertising customers but that will be part of the discussion on next month's Webinar.
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Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google Inc, said on Thursday it is expanding beyond funding for alternative energy to focus on projects in health and combating poverty and climate change.
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Technology consultancy Capgemini will begin recommending Google Inc.'s online suite of office software to its corporate customers, bolstering the Internet search leader's effort to drum up more sales to big businesses.
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Google could help keep Yahoo away from Microsoft if it took over selling search ads for Yahoo in return for a very large check. That money could help finance all sorts of possible deals.
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Google is expanding the usage of its enterprise search solutions by teaming  up with Ingram Micro, one of the world&#8217;s largest technology products distributors. Google and Ingram Micro had sealed an international IT Distribution Agreement that would grant Ingram Micro the right to distribute Goolge Mini and Google Search Appliance. Google Mini is a search [...]
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Google has introduced a number of new features to its Google Book Search that allow users to more thoroughly explore and share books and passages online.
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(InfoWorld) - Google Inc. plans to extend the product search capabilities on its main Google.com Web search engine in the fourth quarter, in time for the holiday shopping season. A Google official shared the news with attendees of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) Summit in San Francisco this week, according to people at the conference. When people search for products on Google.com, the system will present them with another search box so that they can refine their query, wrote Bear Stearns & Co. Inc. analysts in a note published Friday. After people refine their query, Google takes them to a second page populated with product results from the Google Base listings service, wrote the analysts, who attended Google official's presentation. "Ranking will be determined by the attributes that the sellers listed for the product as well as by relevancy," the analysts wrote. Currently, Google has no plans to monetize this product-search capability with display ads or listing fees, but that could change, they wrote. The plan also involves de-emphasizing Froogle as a destination Web site and moving its comparison-shopping capabilities to Google.com, because, as the Google official explained, most product searches happen on Google.com, according to the note. Google.com can already detect if someone is looking for real estate to buy, and asks users to refine their queries before delivering listings from Google Base. Thus, the plan outlined at the PESA conference would apparently be a significant extension of this existing feature toward multiple product categories. Jonathan Garriss, PESA's executive director, got very excited after learning at the conference of Google's plans. "Anything that improves product search and helps shoppers find what they want is always positive for a merchant like me," said Garriss, chief executive officer of Gotham City Online, an apparel store on eBay that also has its own site. Garriss already feeds product information from his store to Google Base. But after talking to Google officials at the conference, he plans to improve it. "It will make it a it smarter search. Google is giving us an opportunity to do that," Garriss said. PESA groups about 600 large eBay sellers that collectively generate over 70 million eBay transactions and US$1 billion in eBay gross merchandise volume annually. Google Base was introduced last November as a service for individuals and organizations to post content to the Google search index, including products for sale. From the beginning, Google said that Base isn't meant as a destination Web site, but more like a database to feed information to Google search sites, like Google.com. To stress this point, Google recently removed the search box from the Google Base site. Neither Google or the Bear Stearns analysts immediately replied to requests for comment. Â
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Web search leader Google Inc. has  begun delivering a set of essential business software tools to  paying subscribers, in a move to widen its appeal to corporate  customers, the company said on Wednesday.
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Internet search engine Google&#39;s new search options may make Amazon.com look old fashioned. The service Google Print will allow people to read sections of books to decide whether
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In addition to paid search, retailers should pay attention to SEO and shopping search engines, according to a new study from TrafficLeader.
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Google is attempting to jump over language barriers in a single bound. The search king this week launched a new feature to convert search results into 12 different languages. The long-term implications could be a boon for e-commerce.
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Software giant eyes search pioneer to bolster its competition with Google.