Google Search provides potential product purchasers with a lot of useful information about whatever product they are looking for, including data such as the price, brand, type, its different features, and even the stores near you where said product is available. Today, Google Search has become even more useful for users searching for information about their next purchase, as starting today, product reviews will be shown in the Knowledge Graph card on the right-hand side of the page. These short snippets will greatly improve the overall experience of shoppers as they will find what people are saying about the product they are searching for. This new feature also demonstrates how Google is further moving towards one of its main goals of serving as a unified ecosystem, keeping all of its users inside its own services.
This new feature was first found by Search Engine Land, and was reported to directly pull quotes from websites with already existing reviews. Google does this by analyzing the websites shown in the search results, and then adding quotes from them into the company’s Knowledge Graph. Most of the reviews shown in the card at the right come from websites that might be selling the product and from the product’s official website. Users will be also able to seamlessly view all the reviews available for a product with the clicking a single link. If you click on one of the quoted reviews, Google will redirect you to the website from which the short citation came from so you can read the full review from there.
Google has been accused of not giving other websites a fair chance to gain traffic by displaying all of the information the user might need in a single Knowledge Graph powered card, greatly reducing the possibility of the user having to recur to a different website. This will now also affect product reviewing websites such as CNET, Consumer Search, and Consumer Reports; while it is still unclear how much traffic will Google’s latest feature purloin from review websites, it will without have a strong impact and fuel the numerous accusations pointing towards the company being unfair towards its competition.
