Google recently launched “Similar Items,” a rich product feature for Google Image Search. The new feature enables users to browse and shop inspirational fashion photography and find product information about items they’re interested in.
Similar Items is an obvious competitor to Pinterest and users will find the feature familiar. Using machine vision technology, the Similar Items feature identifies products in lifestyle images and displays matching products to the user.
Similar Items currently supports handbags, sunglasses and shoes and will expand to other apparel and home & garden categories in the coming months. Google says that, “Finding price and availability information was one of the top Image Search feature requests from our users.”
The feature is currently available on mobile web and the Android search app globally and expansion to more platforms is planned this year.
Want to get your products listed? 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 & 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.