Google Adds Merchandising/Navigation to Product Search Home Page

Google has for the first time added some high-level merchandising to the Product Search home page by linking product images to queries under a "Gift Ideas for Father's Day" heading. Though it does technically involve a search, the resulting user experience is more like a category browse. It's difficult to know how much traffic actually comes through this page but it seems merchants who have good placement on these queries will benefit from this. The terms are generic enough where any merchant who is already including general keywords in their content probably don't need to take any action but this is further reason for those merchants who aren't including such keywords to start doing so.