Page 67 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

2.4 Merchant Solutions: Electronic Catalogs, Search Engines, and Shopping Carts 45

Search Engines Visual Shopping Search Engine

Customers look for information (e.g., requests for product Visual search means looking for information that is pre-
information or pricing) in similar ways. This type of request sented visually (photos, images, etc.) For an overview, see
is repetitive, and answering such requests manually is costly. scholarpedia.org/article/Visual_search. This technology
Search engines deliver answers economically and efficiently can be used to support e-commerce. For example, google.
by matching questions with frequently asked question (FAQ) com/shopping provides a visual search engine based on
templates, which respond with “canned” answers. In general, machine learning and computer vision that focuses on con-
a search engine is a computer program that can access sumer products.
databases of Internet or intranet resources, search for specific Visual search is popular when conducted on mobile
information or keywords, and report the results. devices.
Google’s Internet Explorer and Chrome, and Bing are the
most popular search engines in the USA. Baidu is the pri- Social Network Search Engines
mary search engine in China. Portals such as Yahoo! and
MSN have their own search engines. Special search engines Social network search, also known as social search, is a class
organized to answer certain questions or search in specified of online search engines that help people find material about
areas include ask.com, mamma.com, and looksmart.com. social networking activities, such as in user-generated con-
Thousands of different public search engines are available tent, discussion groups, or recommendations. Like all search
(see searchengineguide.com). Each of these tools excels in engines, these organize, prioritize, and filter search results.
one or a few areas. These can be very specialized with differ- Examples of such search engines are: socialmention.com—
ent capabilities. In addition, many companies have their own “real-time social media search and analysis,” yoname.
enterprise search engines. com—“people search across social networks, blogs, and
more,” bing.com/explore/social. For an overview, see the
Voice-Powered Search blog “Social is the Next Search” available at info.gigya.com/
rs/gigya/images/Gigya-Social-The-Next-Search.pdf. For a
To ease searching, especially when using a smartphone, discussion of the benefits and concerns, see en.wikipedia.
Google introduced a voice-powered tool (Google Voice org/wiki/Social_search.
Search; google.com/intl/es419/insidesearch/features/voice-
search/index-chrome.html) that allows you to skip the key-
board altogether. The first product was included as part of Shopping Carts
iPhone’s mobile search application. It allows you to talk into
your phone, ask any question, and the results of your query An electronic shopping cart (also known as shopping bag
are provided on your iPhone. In addition to asking questions or shopping basket) is software that allows customers to
by talking into your iPhone, you can also listen to search accumulate items they wish to buy before they arrange pay-
engine results. For an example of Apple’s intelligent personal ment and check out, much like a shopping cart in a super-
assistant, “Siri,” see apple.com/ios/siri and imore.com/siri. market. The electronic shopping cart software program
Several language translators use a similar technology. automatically calculates the total cost, and adds tax and ship-
ping charges when applicable. Customers can review and
Video and Mobile Search revise their shopping list before finalizing their purchase by
clicking on the “submit” button.
There are dozens of dedicated search tools and sites that will Shopping carts for B2C are fairly simple (visit amazon.
search for videos and other images. Some of them, such as com to see an example), but for B2B, a shopping cart may
bing.com/videos, will search across multiple sites; others, be more complex. Shopping cart software is sold or pro-
such as YouTube, will search only for their own content. For vided free to store builders as an independent component
a list of over 40 sites, see thesearchenginelist.com/video- outside a merchant suite (e.g., see networksolutions.com/e-
search. For another example, the search engine Bing has a commerce/index-v3.jsp—“create an online store now,
search feature that allows you to listen to more than 5 million zippycart.com, and wpeasycart.com). It also is embed-
full length songs. ded in merchants’ servers, such as aabacosmallbusiness.
com/ecommerce. Free online shopping carts (trials and
Mobile Search demos) are available at volusion.com and 1freecart.com;
powered by MyFreeCommerce.com. For shopping cart
Several search engines are adapted to mobile search. Notable applications for Facebook, see ecwid.com/facebook-
are Google, Yippy, and Yahoo! commerce?