YouTube adds shopping comparison tables to Ask YouTube search
YouTube is adding shopping features to Ask YouTube, its experimental conversational search tool. Product review searches can now return organised video recommendations in a comparison table that lists product attributes and categories based on the viewer's preferences.
Once a viewer picks a review from the table, they can keep asking questions about the product on that video's watch page. Johanna Voolich, YouTube's Vice President of Product Management for Viewer Products, said the follow-up questions happen directly on the watch page, and viewers can use voice commands while watching on a TV.
The search version of Ask YouTube remains an experiment, available to a limited number of users in the United States searching in English on a computer, mobile or TV device, with availability gradually expanding. The watch-page version is live in dozens of countries and languages for signed-in users aged 13 and over, and Sundar Pichai said in June that more than 140 million users had engaged with it.
YouTube has not given rollout timing, geography or eligibility details for the shopping capabilities, and its help pages do not explain how videos are selected for product searches or where the product attribute data comes from. The search help page says conversations are not used to show ads during the experimental phase, while the watch-page help page notes that eligible tagged products may appear in responses.
Reported by Search Engine Journal ↗