Google has become the world’s most powerful brand and the biggest and best digital advertiser through an innovative approach to its mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Search engine giant Google has been working on a new project called the Knowledge Graph that aims to help you make sense of the web. Google is reinventing commerce. It’s not only disrupting e-commerce companies it’s changing the world of commerce in general.
1. Google is Reinventing Shopping
I had the pleasure of spending some time with the team behind Google Shopping, which is the company’s new shopping platform. Google wants to make shopping easier and more relevant for consumers, which is why its new platform is so interesting. Google is trying to make it possible for shoppers to easily access, compare, and shop from across the web and from mobile devices. This isn’t just a search engine, it’s an all-in-one tool for buying anything online. Google’s shopping platform will likely change the way that consumers interact with search engines and websites.
2. The Google Experience
For Google to successfully influence our online shopping behavior, Google must first know who we are. Once Google knows who we are and what we’re looking for, Google can apply its knowledge to make shopping smarter, faster and more efficient.
The Google experience in e-commerce is built on three principles:
- An understanding of what the customer is looking for.
- A way to give them exactly what they are looking for and nothing else.
- A way to help them achieve their goals (in the case of Google search, it’s helping them find the best product).
3. Google is Going Offline
This is the first time that Google is offering offline access for mobile shoppers. While Google has been testing this feature for a few years now, it seems to finally be available to all Android users. This means that consumers will no longer have to worry about having any signal or connectivity while shopping online. This new feature is expected to be released for iOS soon.
4. Google’s Secret Weapon
Google has been very secretive about its secret weapons (or lack thereof) in e-commerce. While many have claimed that Google is giving the edge to online retailers, there’s no proof that Google Search is the difference maker between successful and unsuccessful e-commerce sites. The fact is that Google has a whole suite of products and services designed to help online retailers increase their conversion rates and boost their organic search rankings.
5. Google’s New Search Experience Will Be Your New Reality
The Google homepage looks like the new Google search experience. That means there’s no longer any need to type in search terms to navigate to a specific page. Now you can just click to get the results. This is also the first step toward the death of the back button. If you don’t like the results you’re presented with, you’ll be forced to click through pages until you find the page you’re looking for.
6. Google Now Gets Personalized
When Google introduced a personalized news card feature in June 2014, it was met with widespread approval. In fact, many people were quick to point out that Google Now was already personalized and this new feature just made it even better. Google Now has been customized for us before. We’ve used search history to determine the content we’ve searched for most often. But Google Now goes beyond just using past search behavior. Google Now is also a machine learning engine that learns our routines and habits. So if we’ve used Google Now to send texts to friends or to get directions to dinner spots, it will also use this information to help predict what we want to hear from Google.
7. Google’s Biggest Innovation Is The Knowledge Graph
Google is known for its ability to create new products, and this is certainly one example of that. The knowledge graph is a big deal for Google, especially since it’s such a huge change to their business model. Their previous search engine algorithm relied heavily on text. That changed when Google launched its Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph takes the place of Google’s traditional search bar and displays results based on the context of the web page you are viewing. It also shows related searches that are related to the keywords being searched.
8. Google Now Is Getting Real-Time Updates
Google Now will soon get some extra functionality that will allow it to deliver real-time alerts and notifications to its users. The new feature will arrive in Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and will make use of Google’s machine learning and AI capabilities to provide up-to-the-minute information.
9. Google Knows What You’re Buying Online
When you search for something online, Google can tell what you’re looking for just by watching you type. According to a recent study, people tend to type “more similar queries” when looking for something that they haven’t found yet. That’s because Google already knows that if you’ve searched for a certain brand, you’re more likely to want to buy something in that brand, and so Google will predict what you’ll be searching for next.
Conclusion
In the future, if we’re looking at how things used to be, I think that the world of commerce will probably look very different than it does now. There will be more of a focus on the value of content and building a strong online presence. In the future, it’s more likely that customers will be looking for products and services that are relevant to them. They’ll be looking for companies that are helping them find answers to their questions, and they’ll be spending more of their time on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. And, in the future, it’s likely that more and more companies will be turning to eCommerce sites to promote their products.
