Google revamps shopping search to let Indian users compare prices easily

The experience will also be available as a Progressive Web App (PWA) for users with entry level phones, said Google.

Google on Thursday said it launched shopping search features to make the experience more personal and allow users to easily filter through offers, review prices from multiple retailers and find the products they are looking for.

The new experience is available via a "Shopping" home page, shopping tab in Google search and style search in Google Lens, an image recognition mobile app, Google said.

"More than 40 million Indians are coming online every year, and search is an integral part of their online journey," Surojit Chatterjee, Vice President - Product Management, Google said.

"From seasoned desktop shoppers to first-time users with entry-level smartphones, we hope this new shopping experience will make finding what people are looking for just a little bit easier," Chatterjee said.

The new "Shopping" home page is a made-to-browse destination for shoppers to search across multiple product categories, and browse products from thousands of retailers.

To make the shopping experience richer, Google said it added smart features like price drops and a collection of the most popular products on the search engine.

The experience will also be available as a Progressive Web App (PWA) for users with entry level phones, Google said.

The "Shopping Tab" in Google Search will allow users to post queries in Hindi and English and show product lists, local store inventory and review prices from across multiple retailers.

Finally, "Style Search" in Google Lens is an all-new visual approach to find products such as clothes, furniture and home decor by simply pointing the Lens app.

Google also announced the availability of the Merchant Centre in Hindi starting Thursday, besides English.

For retailers, Merchant Centre offers the place to upload store and product data for Shopping ads.

So far, the Merchant Centre has been only available in English.

Retailers can now also use Merchant Centre to upload product details so they can appear across Google, without paying for ad campaigns, Google said.

"With this launch, our aim is to support the entire retail ecosystem, from shopping sites and large retailers to small local shops, and give them the tools, technology and scale to thrive in today's digital economy," Chatterjee said.

Business Standard

Huawei Nova 3, Nova 3i to offer Google Lens-like visual search for shopping

The Huawei Nova 3 and Nova 3i would be the first Huawei smartphones to boast the company's recently announced GPU Turbo technology, which the company claims to boost graphic performance by up to 60%.

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei is gearing up to launch the Huawei Nova 3 and Nova 3i in India on July 26. Both the phones would feature a Google Lens-like artificial intelligence-based visual search for online shopping, according to a teaser shared by the company on Twitter. The smartphones would be the first Huawei smartphones to boast the company’s recently announced GPU Turbo technology.

The Google Lens allows users to get relevant information about anything by just pointing the camera to an object. The Google Lens uses the company's machine learing alogithm to recognise objects and search the internet to provide relevant information around them. Samsung also introduced the Samsung Mall app, which uses a similar visual search interface to provide easy shopping experience.

The GPU Turbo technology, on the other hand, is a graphic processing acceleration technology developed by Huawei, which is claimed to improve the phone’s graphic performance by up to 60 per cent, and the processor efficiency by up to 30 per cent. According to the company’s claim, the GPU Turbo technology re-architects how graphics are processed on the system level and boosts the performance without reducing the processor’s efficiency.

In order to allow users to experience the GPU Turbo technology enhancements, Huawei would pre-install graphic-intensive games such as PUBG and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang in the Huawei Nova 3 and Huawei Nova 3i. The company would also set 10 different vibrations for 30 different scenarios within these games, including shots, explosions and quakes, among others.

Coming on to the specifications and features of the Huawei Nova 3, the phone would features a 6.3-inch diagonal fullHD+ LCD screen in a 19:9 aspect ratio. It would be powered by Kirin 970 system-on-chip (SoC), paired with 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage. The phone would sport dual camera set-ups on both the rear and the front. The rear cameras use a 16-megapixel RGB sensor and a 24MP monochrome lens, whereas the front cameras use a combination of 24MP and 2MP. Powering the smartphone would be a 3,750 mAh battery.

The Huawei Nova 3 would boot Android Oreo-based EMUI 8.0 ROM with native support for artificial intelligence. The phone would feature 3D Qmoji features, which is Huawei’s adaptation of Apple’s Animoji feature. The phone would be available in black, aqua blue and primrose gold colours.

The Huawei Nova 3i, on the other hand, would be a trimmed-down version of the Huawei Nova 3. It is expected to feature the same specifications of the Nova 3, but would use a Kirin 710 processor instead of the premium Kirin 970. The RAM and storage configurations are also expected to be different from the Nova 3.

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