Monday, April 10, 2017
Image Search recently launched “Similar items” on mobile web and the Android Search app. The
“Similar items” feature is designed to help users find products they love in photos that inspire
them on Google Images. Using machine vision technology, the Similar items feature identifies
products in lifestyle images and displays matching products to the user. Similar items supports
handbags, sunglasses, and shoes and will cover other apparel and home and garden categories in the
next few months.
The Similar items feature enables users to browse and shop inspirational fashion photography and
find product info about items they’re interested in. Try it out by opening results from queries
like “designer handbags”.
Finding price and availability information was one of the top Image Search feature requests from
our users. The Similar items carousel gets millions of impressions and clicks daily from all over
the world.
To make your products eligible for Similar items, make sure to add and maintain schema.org
product metadata on your pages. The
schema.org/Product markup
helps Google find product offerings on the web and give users an at-a-glance summary of product
info.
To ensure that your products are eligible to appear in Similar items:
- Ensure that the product offerings on your pages have
schema.org product markup, including
an image reference. Products with name, image, price and currency, and availability meta-data on
their host page are eligible for Similar items - Test your pages with Google’s
Structured Data Testing Tool
to verify that the product markup is formatted correctly - See your images on image search by issuing the query
site:yourdomain.com. For
results with valid product markup, you may see product information appear once you tap on the
images from your site. It can take up to a week for Googlebot to recrawl your website.
Right now, Similar items is available on mobile browsers and the Android Google Search App
globally, and we plan to expand to more platforms in 2017.
If you have questions, find us in the
dedicated Structured data section
of our forum,
on Twitter, or
on Google+. To prevent
your images from showing in Similar items, webmasters can
opt-out
of Google Images.
We’re excited to help users find your products on the web by showcasing buyable items. Thanks for
partnering with us to make the web more shoppable!
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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