With website visitors only taking an average of 8 seconds to determine if they will stay on the site or not, retailers need to make the search and purchase of products on their site as easy as possible. Google Commerce Search allows website owners to have the search capabilities of Google on their own retail website, so shoppers can find exactly what they are looking for and fast.

According to Google this new version of Commerce Search offers the following enhancements:

• More merchant customization: Today were 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 its hosted in the Google cloud, search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second. Weve 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 theyre 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.

The only downside to Commerce Search is that it is one of the few Google services that arent free. Currently, Google Commerce Search 2.0 is only available in the U.S. and U.K. and Google havent told us if they intend to roll it out elsewhere. You can find more details about Google Commerce Search here or check out the video below.