In a recent episode of Google's "Search Off The Record" podcast, John Mueller and Lizzi from the Search Relations team were joined by special guest Irina Tuduce, an 18-year Google veteran currently working on Shopping.
Key Highlights:
Shopping Infrastructure: Irina explained that shopping results can be provided by both web search and shopping search infrastructures. Merchants can appear in Google Search results through schema.org markup or as product snippets.
Merchant Center: This tool allows merchants to upload product feeds, control data refresh rates, and gain insights into product performance. It's now connected with Search Console, offering a more integrated approach for e-commerce sites.
Bridging the Gap Between Schema.org and Feed Spec: Google revealed it's working to bridge the gap between two key product data sources that power its shopping results – website markup using schema.org structured data and product feeds submitted via Google Merchant Center. The initiative aims to achieve one-to-one parity between the product attributes supported by schema.org's open-source standards and Google's merchant feed specifications. In search results, Google leverages structured data markup and Merchant Center product feeds to surface rich product listings. Implementing schema.org markup allows Google to extract product details from websites during the crawling process, while Merchant Center provides more control over data refreshes.
Ongoing Projects:
- Adding and crawling merchant-level information for the Merchant Knowledge Panel
- Extending organization schema to include more data like shipping, returns, and loyalty programs
Recent Launch: The team discussed the complex process of launching support for product variants, which involved multiple teams and took over a year to complete.
Performance Reporting: Google is working on showing merchants the performance of their products across various Google surfaces to motivate proper markup implementation.
The episode underscored the complexity of e-commerce in search and Google's ongoing efforts to improve the shopping experience for both merchants and users.
You can watch the full episode of "Search Off The Record" below for more insights into Google's shopping and e-commerce initiatives.
