During its Google For India event this month, the Mountain View, California-based company announced several programmes aimed to “streamline and enhance the business experience for brands, merchants and consumers alike”. “Generative AI, especially, is helping us reimagine what a search engine can do,” Shivani Mohan, senior director, UX research, Search, said.
Take Google’s new Search Generative Experience or SGE, that incorporates generative AI into Search to make shopping smoother. When searching for a product, one will get a snapshot of noteworthy factors to consider and products that fit the bill. A complex question, such as “What restaurants to include in an itinerary for a trip to Kerala”, which would have earlier entailed visiting several pages, checking reviews and making a list for oneself, can now be answered through SGE. It has been launched in India in both English and Hindi.
A prospective buyer will also get product descriptions that include up-to-date reviews, ratings, prices and product images. This new generative AI shopping experience is built on Google’s Shopping Graph, which has more than 35 billion product listings — making it the world’s most comprehensive dataset of constantly changing products, sellers, brands, reviews and inventory out there.
Then there is the Merchant Centre, which uses AI to build catalogues for businesses and brands just by using information given on their websites. This is aimed to engage better with shoppers, says Shalini Puchalapalli, managing director, Google Customer Solutions, India. “We automatically populate a merchant’s feed with the information that we can detect from their website, giving merchants full control over what gets added in their feed. We also give them valuable insights on top-selling products,” she says. This product has started rolling out and will be available for everyone by next year.
Making Search simpler is a continuous process at Google. With its Lens feature, which was previewed way back in 2017, one could simply click a picture of something that one was looking for and the search engine would throw up the closest results.
These developments are part of a race to become the leader in the $14.7-billion AI in marketing industry, set to grow to $145 billion by 2032 at a CAGR of 25.6%. It’s a bitter battle out there and the competition is tech giants Meta and Microsoft.
The company says features like SGE are an attempt to help small and medium-sized businesses succeed online as the toll gates for their success remain high. For this, it is doubling down on two major aspects of the shopping experience. First, by helping businesses show up in the “best way” for shoppers, and second, by expanding the discovery of small businesses and brands.
Google’s Merchant Centre may be perceived by users as an e-commerce marketplace, not that different from Amazon. But unlike Amazon, it has a different business model. Since it is an aggregator and not an e-tailer, it will make its money from ads and search, rather than profit from selling products, say experts.
Samit Sinha, founder & managing partner of Alchemist Brand Consulting, says, “The danger is, like any powerful tool it can also be misused; in this case to subliminally influence the consumer’s mind and manipulate buying behaviour in favour of sellers.”
The feature is an “interesting development”, remarks Naresh Gupta, co-founder and managing partner, Bang in the Middle. “But,” he says, “this will help Google more than anyone else. They will offer sharper, more customised advertising to brands. Thus costs will go up and Google will be charging a premium.”
Gupta says the company might try and add products such as Google Pay into the shopping process in the future. As all of these fall in place, the chances of the consumer’s journey dropping off or getting interrupted will be reduced considerably.
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