In what seems to be one of the most egregious Google Shopping Product Search bugs we’ve seen in a while, a simple search for ‘pet food’ or ‘dog food’ (with or without quotes) yields no results at all–a search that we imagine is quite popular for the millions of critter lovers everywhere.
This has been confirmed by multiple credible sources (our friends and families) that this is what is showing up:
A search on a mobile device yields the same result:
In fact any search that includes “dog food” such as ‘purina dog food’ or ‘dry dog food’ or ‘dog food comparison shopping management’ yields nothing.
However a search for ‘cat food’ shows results as they normally do:
We’re assuming this will be resolved soon, but there are two things we may can gather from this:
-Google has successfully created robot programmers that now behave as cats, and these cat overlords want to get rid of all the dogs in the world, or,
-It looks like as Google begins to roll out the transition to the new Google Shopping there will be some buggy issues along the way.
Hopefully for the sake of retailers everywhere (and dogs who may soon be starving) these types of errors will no longer show up in the future.
Update: It looks like the search is working for some of us again, though this new page has Google’s standard Adwords in the shopping page filling up about 80% of the fold, with the first result (linking to a comparison page) filling out the fold–which may indicate that top bid-placement is going to be all the more important for products/merchants not on comparison pages.