Menlo Park (ip-192.com): Google launched a new search engine service specifically designed for large e-commerce retailers. Google Commerce Search puts a key element of a retail website’s shopping experience in Google’s hands: the consumers’ ability to find the merchandise.

With a starting price of $50,000 per year, Google Commerce Search will run on Google servers. Retailers will be able to feed data from their product catalog to Google. This will allow the search engine to perform searches of a retailer’s catalog significantly faster than what is currently available on many retail sites, said Google Enterprise Search Lead Product Manager Nitin Mangtani. The service is “cloud-based”, meaning that the information is stored in Goggles data centers around the world. Commerce Search integrates with other Google products, so you can check its effectiveness using Google Analytics.

Google increasingly tries to diversify its revenue stream by adding products and services aimed at corporate customers. In 2008, approximately 97 percent of Google’s $22 billion revenue originated from online advertising. However, the company says that it its cloud-based email and productivity software now generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Footwear maker Birkenstock USA is the first customer using the product and Mangtani said a “good number” of retailers have been testing it over the past three or four months. The $50,000 price includes up to 10 million search queries.

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