In stock nearby? Look for the blue dots.

Thursday, March 11, 2010 | 9:00 AM

(Cross-posted with the Google Merchant Blog)

Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, demonstrated last December a preview version of Product Search for mobile with local inventory, which lets you see right in your search results whether items are in stock at nearby stores. We're happy to announce that as of today, if you're searching for a product that is sold by participating retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, or West Elm, you can just look for the blue dots in the search results to see if it's available in a local store. If you see a blue dot, you can tap on the adjacent "In stock nearby" link, and you'll be taken to the seller's page where you'll see whether the item is "In Stock" or has "Limited Availability" near you. You'll also see how far away the stores are from you -- as long as you've enabled My Location or manually specified your location.

If you have an iPhone, Palm WebOS phone, or any Android-powered device, and you're in the US, just go to Google.com in your mobile browser, tap on the "more" link, and then select "Shopping." Or look for the "Shopping results" section in Universal Search results when you search on Google.com.
Finally, if you're a retailer and you'd like to participate in this program, we want to hear from you. Please fill out this brief form to let us know that you'd like to be considered. In the meantime, you can get prepared by making sure your Local Business Center data is up to date, and ensuring that your Product Search data is in great shape.

5 comments:

Benoit Maison said...

It would be great if Google Product Search could add a barcode scanner for its iPhone-bearing visitors, like it did for Android.

There is already a free iPhone app that allows it, called pic2shop. It reads UPCs quickly on all iPhone models (even without autofocus), and it can be made to search any web site.

See the live demo to search Google Products at: http://www.pic2shop.com/demo/scan.html

rfairfax said...

Vic Gundotra. Isn't that the same VP who demoed Buzz, then disappeared when people raised privacy concerns, leaving others to clean up that mess. I'd have a tough time trusting anything that guy demos again.

Unknown said...

When will this feature be available for Windows Mobile?

AGENICE said...

Pricecheckah is great. It uses the great redlaser barcode scanner, but gives you results from Amazon, eBay, walmart, overstock, buy.com as well as Google. It even let's you put in your own stores.

And at only 99c.

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=300264101&mt=8

A. K. said...

I tried getting into search as it was instructed and described above and could not get to the page showed on article above... what are they talking about - this does not show on Google.com