Google Catalogs

» see google.com/catalogs as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The American retail catalog is a genuinely foreign object if you grew up in Turkey. A thick glossy book arrives in the mail unasked, full of things you can order by phone, and it sits on a table for a season. We had no version of that. There was no mail-order habit to inherit, and when online shopping did arrive in Turkey it arrived as a website rather than as a paper book that had learned to be a website. Google Catalogs was built for a memory I do not have.

It launched on 16 August 2011 as an iPad app. Google had scanned thousands of merchant catalogs with the page images intact and let you flip through them with a thumb. Nordstrom, L.L.Bean, Macy's and Pottery Barn were all in there with their seasonal books. Tap a product and you got a detail card with a link out to buy it. You could clip pages into a collage and share it, which was the app's one social gesture.

The merchants paid nothing to be included, which tells you what Google thought it was doing. This was never a revenue product. It was an attempt to capture a shopping behavior that happened entirely outside of search, in the window when a tablet still looked like the device that would replace the coffee table.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was actually for ~

There was an earlier product with almost the same name and a completely different shape. Google Catalog Search ran from December 2001 to January 2009 and it was pure Google: mail-order catalogs scanned, run through optical character recognition, made searchable as text. You typed what you wanted and got back the catalog page it appeared on. It was a demonstration that the company would index anything printed if you left it in a room with a scanner.

The 2011 version inverted that. It stopped trying to make catalogs searchable and started trying to make them browsable, because browsing was the entire point of a catalog and search was the thing catalogs had always been bad at. That was a smarter reading of the artifact. It also meant the product no longer had much to do with anything Google was good at.

~ the day it died ~

The mobile apps went first. Google announced in July 2013 that iOS and Android support would end on 15 August, with the web version continuing for United States users only. That announcement is usually the end of a product. Here it bought a two-year reprieve for a version that almost nobody had been using in the first place.

The web version was switched off on 4 August 2015, roughly half a year after the notice went up, with no explanation attached. By then the tablet had settled into being a video screen rather than a shopping surface, and the retailers who had handed over their catalogs were building their own apps. What Google had digitized so carefully was a habit that was ending on its own.

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