[willu]

This is basically the BloomReach approach to SEO and Google seems to be going after it in a serious way lately. The big issue is quality control. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to create these sorts of landing pages if they surface highly relevant results. Google's product search is not comprehensive or sophisticated enough yet to be useful for the common shopper so it's a mistake to penalize highly refined results with no good replacement.

[dangrossman]

It's a shame that Google cares more about propping up ad click numbers for quarterlies than actually solving product search. They surely have the talent, data and traffic incentives for stores to do a much better job at it than anyone else. Instead, they went paid-only a while back, so Google's Shopping results are nothing but ads from the limited number of stores willing to upload a product list and pay for anything that gets clicked.

[btown]

I worry (for BloomReach's sake) that Google will be unable to distinguish algorithmically between search-powered landing pages like eBay's, which (as mentioned in the article) are barely-usable collections of links designed specifically for SEO, and BloomReach-like auto-generated landing pages that are, quite literally, optimized for consumer usability. Just because a page is auto-generated and not curated doesn't make it spam. What makes something spam is that users treat it like spam, consider it spam. But unless Google's using (abusing?) its analytics cookies to track users on sites and see whether they treat an autogenerated page like linkspam or like a content page, they'd have no way of making that decision.