Google’s Similar items will show shoppable photos in Image search

Google’s Image Search is quite similar to Pinterest, which offers shoppable information attached to an image as well.

Google’s Image Search will now make now make shopping for products easier. The Similar items feature in Image Search uses machine vision technology to identify products in lifestyle images and pull out matching products for users. It is available on mobile web and the Android Search app. Google’s Similar items currently supports image search for handbags, sunglasses, and shoes. The company plans to cover other apparel as well as home and garden categories in the next few months.

“The Similar items feature is designed to help users find products they love in photos that inspire them on Google Image Search,” said Julia E, Google’s Product Manager on Image Search, in a blog post. Users can search for queries like designer handbags to get price and availability of similar products.

Google’s Image Search is quite similar to Pinterest, which offers shoppable information attached to an image as well. For their products to show up on on Similar items, developers are required to specifically add metadata to a site. “Products with name, image, price & currency, and availability meta-data on their host page are eligible for Similar items,” reads the blog post.

Lately, Google has been experimenting with quite a lot of features to make Image Search more luring for users as well as advertisers. Reports suggest that Google is testing a new ad format for mobile that plays short videos in Image search section. The feature was first spotted by GoogleSystem blog, which said the videos mostly appear while searching for fashion-related queries.