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August 8, 2009

Google's Special Snippets for Price Comparison Sites

Google added a new option for customizing search results snippets. If you want to buy a product and you're interested to find a good price, click on "Show options" to enable the search options sidebar and select "Prices from the page".


Google will show the same search results, but price comparison sites like PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, Shopzilla will include a message above the snippet: "This site aggregates prices from multiple stores". Snippets have a different formatting: a list of products and the corresponding prices.


The feature would be more useful if Google allowed you to restrict the results to price comparison sites and if the results were better formatted, for example sorted by price. It's also surprising to see that Google doesn't integrate the results from it's own price comparison site, Google Product Search.

5 comments:

  1. I quite like this feature, it annoys me when I click through to site that only has a list of suppliers without being able to buy direct

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  2. Great, profits both Google and the really worthwile sites.

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  3. That's exactly what the customers need. This will open new marketing doors for real products.
    Excellent feature, worth to keep it in mind...
    Kind regards from Germany and sorry for my worse english :-)
    Guenni

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  4. It's an interesting feature, but I am seeing it pull incorrect "prices" from pages. For instance, I'm seeing it mis-represent cash-back/rebate amounts as the price of the product. I'm wondering if using their pricing microformat would help.

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  5. The first example is called rich snippets. You can find out more on how to create them here...

    http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html

    I'd like to know how the second example is pulled together though. I've seen it on websites that don't support rich snippets.

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