Easy holiday shopping with Google Product Search

This holiday season, whether you're shopping for a new sweater for Fido, a Lego set for young builders, or that fancy camera you've been eyeing all year, Google Product Search can help you find what you're looking for at a great price. You can compare products and prices from merchants across the web, from popular retailers like Amazon and Best Buy to places to buy unique gifts like eBay and Etsy.

Check out some of the recent improvements we've made to Google Product Search:

• Our new gallery view shows larger, higher-resolution images to help pick the style or model that is right for you. Check out some [digital cameras] or [sweater boots].

• Check the Reviews section of our product pages before you buy — we're now including review summaries to help you see what people are saying at a glance. 

• We've recently integrated video product reviews from YouTube, which appear right on the product pages so you can get an in-depth look at items before you buy. 

• If you want to see or purchase an item in person, click nearby stores to see a map of nearby store locations for that seller. 

• Product Search works great on mobile phones, so you can compare prices, read reviews and even find coupons from the Local Business Center while you're shopping. You can also use the nifty barcode scanner on your phone to compare prices quickly and easily.

We hope these new features help you find the perfect gifts for your friends and family (and maybe even something nice for yourself) this holiday season.

Happy shopping!

Posted by Sameer Samat, Product Management Director & Jeff Bartelma, Senior Product Manager

Displaying the best display ad with Teracent

Can you spot the difference between these two sample display ads? Of course you can. However, the most important difference is not discernible to the naked eye.

The lower ad was customized and chosen from thousands of different creative elements, automatically and in real-time, by machine-learning algorithms developed by Teracent, a San Mateo, California startup.

We think that this technology has great potential to improve display advertising on the web. That's why we're pleased to announce today that we've entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Teracent. The transaction, which is subject to various closing conditions, is expected to close this quarter.

As you know, we've been busy releasing new features and products to help improve display advertising on the web for everyone. We believe that Teracent's technology fits neatly into these efforts.

Teracent's technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors. These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.

This technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns. In turn, this enables publishers to make more money from their ad space and delivers web users better ads and more ad-funded web content.

We're looking forward to welcoming the Teracent team to Google and to making this technology available to our display advertising clients — including those who run display ad campaigns on the Google Content Network and our DoubleClick clients.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management and Joerg Heilig, Engineering Director