Behind Boutiques.com Stands a New and Surprisingly Adaptable Google
Editor's Note: to see our infographic slideshow on Retail Shopping in 2015, click here.
Today Google (GOOG) officially launched Boutiques.com, a site where users can discover new fashion items. The search giant is using it as a calling card for its newly revamped product search engine -- but what's really going on here?
After a conversation with a Google spokesperson, the motivations are clear: Google is launching Boutiques.com to dip its toe into retail sales and to showcase its technology. There is explosive growth in the sale of soft goods online, said the Google spokesperson, who asked not to be quoted. Google sees this as a market ready to bloom, and it wants in on the action.
Secondly, it doesn't think that any other company has nailed the oh-so-crucial auto-recommendation feature that we, the consumer, rely upon to find new clothes. They believe that their new product search, which they refer to as "machine learning technology," can figure out your style with more finesse than the systems at other sites, which will lead to better recommendations.
But Google has done something very un-Google with Boutiques.com: they've added a human element.
Boutiques.com allows anyone to start their own "boutique" full of items they like. This is called "curation," a term growing in usage in the social Web. It refers to the act of collecting things you find online that represent your personal taste, even if you didn't make these things. The blogging tool Tumblr was one of the pioneers of online curation, and other sites have since adopted the model, letting you "follow" people whose curative tastes you like. Google's official blog post puts curation front and center:
It's called Boutiques.com: a personalized shopping experience that lets you find and discover fashion goods, by creating your own curated boutique or through a collection of boutiques curated by taste-makers -- celebrities, stylists, designers and fashion bloggers.Boutiques.com also lets you "follow" your favorite taste-makers, and Google has launched with some notable ones, like Mary-Kate Olsen. This isn't radically new: sites like ThisNext.com have been doing the exact same thing for several years. But Google was always a company where the almighty algorithm rules, and the idea of human filtering -- like the new system used by Ask.com -- is practically alien. Things have apparently changed.
The Google spokesperson described Boutiques.com to me as a hybrid of both human-filtered and machine-filtered search, which indicates that the company may be starting to soften its algorithmic approach to everything. After years of using robots to comb the Web for your results, the company has clearly acknowledged that machines aren't so useful at helping you discover new things you didn't know existed.
If Google ever does roll out a social network, it might follow the same hybridized model, using both human input (e.g., you adding a "friend") and algorithmic input (e.g., auto-searching the Web for your old colleagues) to help users build a complete social graph. If it did this, it would have a serious advantage over Facebook, which is awfully hit-or-miss at algorithmically searching its network for people. (The big blue social network also has other major usability holes that make it ripe for a Google-led disruption in some demographics.)
However this new hybrid approach takes form, it's clear that this is a new, more human-focused chapter in Google's strategy -- and proof that the company is adapting.
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