Google Commerce Search 3.0 Now Adds Instant Search

[engine]

Google Commerce Search 3.0 Now Adds Instant Search [googleblog.blogspot.com]

Search as You Type provides instant gratification to shoppers, returning product results with every keystroke, right from the search bar
Local Product Availability helps retailers bridge online and offline sales by showing shoppers when a product is also available in a store nearby—in-line with the search results
Enhanced Merchandising tools allow retailers to create product promotions that display in banners alongside related search queries, and to easily set query-based landing pages (for example, when a visitor types [shoes], they’re directed to a “shoe” page)
Product Recommendations (Labs) helps shoppers make purchase decisions by showing them what others viewed and ultimately bought

[tedster]

This is a kind of site search for ecommerce sites. There's a second interesting feature, too: which local stores have a product in stock, designed specifically for MOBILE. You can certainly see the way Google thinks things are moving.

[Robert Charlton]

Interesting that in one of the promotional videos for this application...

Google Commerce Search and Example.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEzMGEVuUeQ [youtube.com]

...Google confirms something about Google search which we've generally been assuming, but I don't think I've seen it stated explicitly by Google elsewhere...

At about 1:30 into the video...

...we wanted to leverage Google's machine learning algorithms....

Also, the search results displayed as query landing pages look more like CMS category and subcategory pages than like traditional search results. These search pages don't appear to rank for competitive searches, but they're not excluded by robots.txt in the sites I checked, and some do show up on site: searches in google.com.

In one of the blog article case studies linked to from the main article, one of retailers says...

In fact, during our testing period we moved half of our traffic to Google Commerce Search and left the remainder on our existing solution – and with Google our conversions from search were 27.7 percent higher and our search revenues were up 34 percent!

Not sure what is meant by "search revenues" or how this system might have affected organic results, if that's what's being discussed, whether the landing page search results were hard linked, etc during the test being discussed, etc. I don't want to make too much of these latter points, but they do arouse my curiosity.