Google to switch to paid product search service by fall

In an overhaul of its online product-search service, Google is  considering including only items from merchants who pay to be included in search results.

The company is moving to a paid model by the fall, and would call the new search tool Google Product Search, wrote Sameer Samat, a Google vice president, in a blog post yesterday. Ads from the service would appear on Google.com's main search engine and be labelled as ''sponsored,'' he wrote.

''Having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date,'' Samat wrote. ''Higher quality data -- whether it's accurate prices, the latest offers or product availability -- should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.''

Under chief executive Larry Page, Google is seeking to boost ad revenue by charging for a service that now drives traffic to a company website for free.

Retailers spent a whopping $7.1 billion on online ads last year, more than any other industry, an increase of 29.1 per cent from 2010, the Interactive Advertising Bureau data shows.

According to Danny Sullivan, a web-search analyst, Google's move marked a shift away from the company's one-time policy of unpaid inclusion in search results.