Google announces ‘Search As You Type’ to lift sales and engagement for website owners

One of my favorite features of Google’s search product is the predictive text for instant suggestions on what to search for. Today, Google is making that feature available for AdWords customers to put on their own site. The company is calling the pilot program “Search As You Type“, and it’s available in the US for AdWords customers right now.

Here’s what Google had to say about it:

Today we’re excited to announce we’re offering one of the most popular features of Google Commerce Search, Search As You Type, as a free, stand alone feature. It’s easy to implement and helps increase sales and conversion rates on merchant websites. The Search As You Type pilot is available to US-based AdWords advertisers for free, up to 25 million searches annually, after which licensing fees would apply.

By implementing this search feature on your site, you can keep people engaged, and more importantly, buying. For the most part, commerce sites have a really bad in-house search experience. With this new tool, companies can have a great search experience, and sell more items:

If someone knows that they want to buy a Transformer, why not start showing them options once they start typing it? I’m really interested to hear about companies who have implemented this, and how it lifts sales for them.

There is a catch though, it’s only free for up to 25M queries a year. For a site like Hasbro, pictured above, that could get eaten up pretty quick.

If you want to try it out, head on over to Lowe’s or Hasbro, which are the Search As You Type launch partners:

It’s extremely interesting to watch all of the tools that consumers get to use on Google.com get retrofitted for other experiences, like commerce. This is exactly why Google can have a hand in so many different verticals, by simply sharing technology across them.