Google Revamps Product Search With Local Availability, Popular Products, And “Aisles”

As we enter the holiday shopping season, Google is ramping up its product search efforts. As we know from research data, more than 46 percent of in-store purchases are influenced by online research. The online-research for offline purchases market is huge ($917 billion to be exact), and Google wants to be the go-to destination for holiday shopper this year. Google is expanding its Blue Dot Specials feature (which launched earlier this year on mobile search) by offering more data on whether a product is available in a nearby brick and mortar store. Google has partnered with over 70 retail brands, including Best Buy and Williams-Sonoma, as well as software manufacturers like JDA, Epicor and Oracle, to show shoppers whether a product is available in a nearby store or location. This data will be available in search under the "nearby stores link."

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Leatherbound Helps You Compare eBook Prices and Availability

Even as eBook sales soar, the experience of browsing and buying eBooks still leaves a lot to be desired. If you are more interested in a particular title than in your loyalty to a particular eReader, looking for the cheapest version - or even an available version - of a book can be pretty tedious.

Is it even in the iBookstore? Is it cheaper on Amazon's Kindle or on the Barnes & Noble Nook?

Leatherbound addresses that problem by giving users a site where they can look for titles and compare their prices for Kindle, Nook, and iBook. Enter an author name or title, and the site responds with price, availability, and a link to the appropriate eBookstore. Quick and simple.

Sponsor

Leatherbound was created this weekend as part of the Rails Rumble, a programming competition that gives teams 48 hours to build a web app in Ruby on Rails.

Team Leatherbound is comprised of Andrew Dumont, Nathan Carnes, Adrian Pike, and Amiel Martin. Dumont, who is also the Director of Business Development at Seesmic, says that the team has plans down the road to add movies and music to the apps' search capabilities. However, as judging for the Rails Rumble competition is going on now, the project has to stay "as is."

But for a weekend project, Leatherbound's "as is" is pretty good.

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