In addition, product information is an integral part of corporate data warehouses that track historical information on products, including sales and ordering patterns, and predict future trends. Whereas any web search engine will only have indexed a portion of existing web pages, any product catalogue is by definition a complete listing of every product in the particular system. A product catalogue usually treats the products as objects, with each object having a set of characteristics and attributes. Moreover, a site that has a catalogue of products has the critical priority of making the products easy to find. When you search a product catalogue, you aren't searching the objects themselves, but rather you search against their characteristics and attributes.
Users do use searches to locate categories of information, such as topic or subject sections.
The Convergence of Product and Document Collections Digital products are blurring some of the distinctions between document collections and product catalogues. For example, if a company sells text reports, and provides a mechanism to perform textual searches against the report itself, then the rules for textual information retrieval would seem to apply. Product-Related Content Many commerce sites have information about their products that goes beyond the basic product catalogue. For example, commerce sites may have reviews about products and articles on using products. A music seller may have articles about artists, articles about genres of music, comparisons of musical works, etc.