Shopping
Google Shopping is getting a ‘for you’ feed of products
Google Shopping is rolling out a personalized feed that shows you a stream of products you might like. The new feature, which is coming to mobile and desktop devices, shows up when you head to shopping.google.com.
At the top of the page, you’ll see a carousel of products you’ve recently shopped for, allowing you to jump back into your search. But once you scroll down, Google will surface recommended products and in-line videos related to items you might be interested in. Google will use your recent searches and YouTube videos to personalize your feed.
If you come across something in your feed that you don’t like, you can hit the “thumbs-down” button to prevent Google from showing anything similar. Its setup sounds pretty similar to the algorithm-driven “for you” pages that have popped up on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Threads, and even YouTube.
“Imagine a store that’s tailored just to your current interests, and that’s really what we set out to create here,” Sean Scott, Google’s vice president and general manager of consumer shopping, told The Verge during a briefing. Google is also rolling out a personalized deals tab that will show products tailored to your interests. You won’t see any personalization if you’re not logged in to Google.
That’s not the only major update Google is making to its shopping experience. Now, when you search for a product in Google and then hit the “Shopping” tab, you’ll see an AI-generated summary with tips on what to look for. As you scroll down, you’ll see products beneath a “top recommendations” heading, along with a blurb about why you should consider each one.
For the search “tea kettle for matcha,” Google displays three suggested tea kettles and highlights “precise temperature control & control pour for one,” while another has “fast boiling & keep warm function.”
When asked about how Google chooses recommended products, Scott said Google uses keywords to search the “entire corpus of reviews” on the web to locate articles about particular products. “There’s a lot happening behind the scenes … in order to pull all that content forward,” Scott said.
Further down the page, Google will lump other results into categories, like “Variable temperature kettles for matcha” or “Electric gooseneck kettles for matcha.” You’ll have to scroll all the way bottom of the page if you want to see the catalog of results that Google Shopping previously displayed.
Google’s revamped shopping experience is rolling out for mobile and desktop users in the US “over the coming weeks, starting today.”
Update, October 15th: Clarified that the personalized feed is coming to mobile and desktop.