Google Commerce Search 2.0

Summer is here, and so is Google Commerce Search 2.0 School is out for the summer, and that means it's time for some swimsuit shopping, travel purchases and—before we know it—buying back-to-school supplies. To help retail sites get ready for the summer shopping season, today we're launching Google Commerce Search 2.0 for retailers in the United States and United Kingdom. The new version of Google Commerce Search provides a better experience online for shoppers and greater control—with immediate ROI—for retailers. Google Commerce Search, first launched a little over six months ago, is an enterprise-grade website search solution hosted in Google's cloud and designed specifically for online retailers. This second release includes a number of improvements: More merchant customization: Today we're introducing a full merchandising dashboard, which gives merchants more control over promotions, ranking rules and filtering. Marketers and product merchandisers can now do all of this themselves—no custom code necessary. New intuitive retailer controls like time-based promotions, navigation bar with filters, and simple product ranking rules mean seasonal optimizations can be done on the fly. Better shopper experience: With query autocompletion, retailers can offer common queries to shoppers in real time, as they type, without any custom coding. GCS is also faster and more relevant than before thanks to search quality improvements. Because it's hosted in the Google cloud, search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second. We've also added spelling and stemming dictionaries and new custom synonym options to make shopping on a retail site as easy and accurate as searching on Google.com. Improved browsing and navigation: Many shoppers depend on the search bar on retail sites when they're looking to make a purchase, but some people will always prefer to navigate through different categories and discover new products. Now, Google Commerce Search allows visitors to shop by browsing around your site as well as searching directly for products. Finally, we're making the benefits of Google Commerce Search 2.0 available to a wider range of retailers by introducing a pricing model that starts at $25,000/year. Get in touch with us to learn more. As more consumers turn to online channels to purchase and research products, it's important for your site to keep up with them using the best technology out there. So with summer just around the corner, make sure your sunscreen's on, your beach blanket is ready and your e-commerce site is optimized with Google Commerce Search. Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager

Edit video online with the YouTube Video Editor Posted: 16 Jun 2010 10:13 PM PDT With software installations and complicated instructions, editing video can be a hassle—but we think it should be easy. Today, we're introducing YouTube's new online video editor, which makes editing your video a cinch. It's available in TestTube, where YouTube engineers and developers test out new tools and get feedback on how they're doing. With this new editor, you can: Combine multiple videos you've uploaded to create a new longer video Trim the beginning and/or ending of your videos Add soundtracks from our AudioSwap library of tens of thousands of songs Create new videos without worrying about file formats and publish them to YouTube with one click—no upload necessary All that, and you don't need to install any extra software. Here's a video from YouTube user rewboss that gives you a glimpse of how it works: Check out the YouTube Blog for more details. And once you've given the editor a whirl, let us know what you think by leaving a comment on the YouTube Blog. Posted by Rushabh Doshi, Software Engineer