Google Partners with Edgenet for High Quality Product Data

Google has taken an initiative to show high quality product data, it will help you for finding products offline in local stores. Google has also recently launched a new shopping website named Boutiques.com. You can browse more products with additional improvements in Google Product Search. There are also product listing ads which are open for US advertisers since last November.

In short, there are lot of improvements in Google Product Search and Product Advertising by Google. Now you can get more detailed data through Google’s Partnership with Edgenet.

Edgenet is a leading product content collection company to drive first time offering to manufacturers and suppliers. Edgenet has described its relationship with Google in following words…

“This service delivers complete and correct product information to help consumers find the products they’re looking for on Google.com and Google Product Search…….. Ensuring that shoppers have access to accurate and complete product data will improve the online shopping experience, and help consumers, retailers and suppliers”

This product data quality will ensure product content meets and standards which are set by Google. You can simple check a product page to find more information.

 

This high quality product data has also impacted organic search results on Google. A search result page for Canon digital camera will now look like below.

You can see the product search images in the center of the page while product listing ads are on the right of the page.

I am sure that this improved Product Search will help you in finding your product quickly.

Google Architecture Overview

In this post, I will tell you how the whole Google Search Engine system works.  You can see the complete Google functioning in below figure.

This is a high level Google Architecture; several distributed crawlers are used for downloading web pages from the web. URLserver sends list of urls to the crawlers. Then crawler fetches the web pages and sends them to the storeserver. Then the storeserver compresses the fetched web pages and stores them in a repository. Each web page has a associated id number which is called docID. docID is assigned when any url is parsed from a web page. The indexer part reads the repository, uncompresses and parses the documents. The documents are converted into hits (i.e. set of word occurrences).  The indexer then distributes these hits into various set of barrels.

The indexer parses all the links in web pages and stores important information in an anchors file. The file contains all information regarding a link.

The URLresolver takes data from anchors file & convert relative urls into absolute urls, then turn them into docIDs. URLresolver also generates links database, which is used to calculate page rank of all documents.

The sorter takes barrelts data and resorts them by wordID and create an inverted index.

The sorter generates list of wordIDs and offsets into an inverted index. A program called DumpLexicon takes this list together with the lexicon produced by the indexer and generates a new lexicon to be used by the searcher. The searcher is run by a web server and uses the lexicon built by DumpLexicon together with the inverted index and the PageRanks to answer queries.

Referred by: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Holiday Update for Google Webmaster Tools

Google has announced new updates for Google Webmaster Tool. It was declared at Google Webmaster Central Blog on Dec 10. This update includes new modifications in “Links to your site” and “Search queries” features.

“Search Queries” Feature Update
Based on user feedback, Google has made some changes to its “Search Queries” section. User can now see the “Search Queries” data for individual pages of site. Now, when user visit “Top Queries” tab, he will find a new Tab named “Top Pages”. This “Top Pages” tab will provide impressions, clicks, CTR and position data for all the top pages of user’s website who are performing good on Google search results.

To see the queries along with their impressions and clicks, user can simply click on the individual page.

 User can also click on the specific query to see the detailed data.

A pie chart is also added for visual representation of the proportions of search type, traffic and its location.

“Links to your site” Feature Update
Google has introduced an “Intermediate Link” concept in which, if there is a link to user’s site that links to URL1 which further redirects to URL2. Then the link from URL1 to URL2 will be shown as an intermediate link. User can also see new “Download all links” option for all tables of “links to your site” feature.

Google is continuously upgrading its tools for providing better data to us. Hope you are pleased with that. Happy Holidays :)

Google eBookstore – An initiative to find great books online

Google Books was launched in 2004, and now we have new Google eBookstore.

On Dec 6, 2010 Google has introduced Google eBookstore for improved access to great and informational books. You can search more that 3 million eBooks from variety of devices including netbooks, laptops, tablets and smartphones. You can store, buy and read books in an organized manner just like you get systematic messages in Gmail.

You can search for the ebook at Google eBookstore and buy from any independent bookseller or any member of American Booksellers Association. You can either buy an ebook or can choose where to buy printed book.

Along with Google eBookstore, Google Books search will also available to all users.