Google announced a new search feature for shopping deals that is powered by Google’s Shopping Graph, a dataset of the entire world’s shopping information plus numerous updates to Chrome that makes it more shopping oriented.
Portals were big in the late 1990s, with AOL being the most obvious example, but they went out of fashion not long after Google introduced their simple search box without the clutter typical of web portals.
Google doesn’t call it a shopping portal but if a web portal is a webpage that aggregates information from across the Internet and makes it accessible to users in an easily navigable manner, then Google’s new search feature qualifies as a shopping portal.
Also announced are changes to Chrome for mobile and desktop that transforms them into a more shopping oriented web browser.
Chief among the new features are a new way for users to bookmark products to a shopping list folder, ability to track prices and get what Google calls “price insights” (which is a new feature for the desktop version of Chrome).
Google says that eight out of ten shoppers are concerned about getting the best deal on holiday gifts.
The intent of these new features is to provide users with twice as many deals on all the products they are looking for.
Among the new features Google is introducing are:
- Search enhancements powered by the Google Shopping Graph
- New deals page on available on Google Search
- New features on Chrome for discovering discounts across the web
- New Price Insights tab in desktop version of Chrome
- Additional ways to track prices from all merchants for the same products
New Google Search Deals Destination
The new search feature for shopping is available by searching for Shop Deals, which takes consumers to a new search destination for shopping deals (that looks like a portal).