Anyone who's ever marked a page in a catalog to remember to buy that perfect sweater -- only to lose that sweater among dozens of catalogs with dog-eared pages strewn on the living room floor -- will appreciate this:
Google's catalog search combs the pages of more than 600 current catalogs -- 1,500 including back issues –- to help both consumers and corporations find everything from apple butter to zipper doodles.
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," said David Krane, a spokesman for the site. "This effort is consistent with our mission."
Pages were fed into a bulk scanner -- similar to a copy machine -- then run through an optical character recognition process, which extracts the text from each page. Google then crawls and indexes the text from the pages.
Both consumer and corporate catalogs are accessible through the search. Catalogs were initially collected by Google staff members, but vendors and users may also suggest a catalog.
"The sheer comprehensiveness of the service makes it incredibly useful," Krane said.
For example, a search for "root beer" brought up a list that includes a kids brew-your-own root beer kit from the Grandparent's Toy Connection catalog; a ProLine premium monofilament fish line in root-beer brown from Cabela's; and handsewn moccasins from Nordstrom in root-beer suede.
A beta version of the site launched last Thursday. There's no link to the catalog search from the Google homepage, but it's accessible through Google's advanced search page or catalogs.google.com.
The catalog company's URL, phone number and catalog code are listed at the top of each page, as well the catalog page number. People may also search within a particular catalog using the Google search.
Several catalog companies support the new feature.
"Google is just a great search engine, and we're happy to be there," said Bill Ihle, a spokesman for gourmet food purveyor Harry and David. "Any exposure that we can get is good exposure. It's an additional way to reach the customers."
"I would think that a few more people will find us," said Michael Beard, managing partner of Raven Maps. "We do one big mailing per year, so in that regard that will extend the life of the catalog."
But will holiday shoppers find a use for it at this late date?
"There was no strategic effort to time the beta release of this service for the holiday shopping season," Krane said. "It's more the inverse of that: The tail end of the shopping season provides us a good opportunity to secure feedback."
The site is free to both catalog publishers and Google users. Users cannot purchase catalog items from the site, but "it's something we're definitely considering supporting in the future" Krane said.
Scanning catalog pages onto a website is not new. CatalogCity.com has been doing it since 1997.
The e-commerce site lists products from over 500 catalog businesses and earns a commission from the company every time a product is sold.
Bruce Sellers, vice president of sales and marketing for the site, said that when a consumer looks at a catalog, that creates the demand for products. Oftentimes, that demand goes out with the recycling. That's where CatalogCity.com comes in.
"Our whole strategy is to re-host the content of individual merchants on CatalogCity.com," Sellers said.
"The catalog industry is the world's foremost authority at selling products to consumers at a distance," he said. "They've been selling a product that consumers can't touch or test."
Sellers said that Google's catalog search "doesn't appear to solve the same problem that we do.... (But) I think the more exposure the catalog business gets on the Web, the better."
