Hover over the dots to explore related posts. Closer dots are more semantically related, and the red dot marks the current page.
Emakina, one of the largest web agencies in Europe, works with internationally acclaimed brands on their branding and electronic presence. To keep their customers ahead of the curve, Emakina has recently started a series of meetups where experts in a wide range of fields come and talk about the latest developments in their field. The last meetup was held last Thursday, 8 February 2018, and with the topic: “A.I. for Commerce”, three talks were scheduled: one from Emakina, one from 904Labs, and one from Salesforce.
In our talk, I described the importance of search in e-commerce by giving examples of failed searches in a number of settings, from finding advertized items using onsite search to mobile search. I followed by with why people choose Amazon to start their product search and highlighted that 54% of them choose Amazon because of their great search functionality–that is the reason number five for people to go to Amazon. Then, I explained why optimizing the ranking manually is close to impossible for humans by laying out the insane amount of options available and enumerating the search space (which can be at millions of millions of choices). With this as foundation, I talked about machine learning and the particular type of machine learning that we use at 904Labs for optimizing search rankings in real-time. I followed up with describing our query intent engine, which is powered by 904Sense, and our automatic synonym extraction engine. In my conclusions, I re-iterated that A.I. for Search can boost search-driven revenue by 30% and that search is becoming part of platforms. In this angle, it is important for online retailers to test the claims of their vendors by doing A/B tests before they opt in for a solution.
Related Posts
-
The vocabulary gap is still an open problem.
People refer to products in different ways that products are described in the catalogue. Neural networks, learning to rank, query intent engines are all important. Our experience at 904Labs shown that a query intent engine that boosts specific product categories given a query, boosts our learning to rank system by more than 16% in additional revenue. These results suggest that effective initial ranking is very important for effective learning to rank. To this end, we foresee an increasing interest in methods that can re-rank the entire collection and not only the top-N documents. This is particularly important for larger shops with large inventories (more than hundred of thousands of items) where a query can return hundreds of items, and only the top few are re-ranked.
E-commerce search is as much as about exploration as it is about finding the best match.
-
Abstract
With the rapid adoption of online shopping, academic research in the eCommerce domain has gained traction. However, significant research challenges remain, spanning from classic eCommerce search problems such as matching textual queries to multi-modal documents and ranking optimization for two-sided marketplaces to human-computer interaction and recom- mender systems for discovery and browsing. These research areas are important for under- standing customer behavior, driving engagement, and improving product discoverability and conversion. In this article we identify the challenges and highlight research opportunities to improve the eCommerce customer experience.
-
It was an intense two days, with lots of people dropping by 904Labs’ booth and asking about what we do and how 904Labs search technology can help them in their settings. Altough the average visitor profile was not looking for onsite search, we had good chats with a bunch of Dutch and international and small, medium, and big companies on how onsite search can help their endeavors. We talked on how search technology is underneath many applications, including chatbots, and self-service applications. No matter the application, good search can help increase revenue in the setting of selling products, or reduce costs in the setting of self-service as visitors are better able to find the information they’re looking for without calling the company’s call centre.
-
Starting my talk at ECIR 2018 Industry track. Courtesy of Gabriela Kazai. European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) is a annual European scientific conference around bhe topics of search engines, recommender systems, text analytics, user modeling, and evaluation. This year ECIR was held in Grenoble, France. With more than 250 attendants and 4 days packed with tutorials, workshops, research, and industry talks, it was a great place to be to get updated with the latest and greatest about search engines.
The theme of this year’s Industry Day was to bring lessons learned from industry to academia. What are differences when developing a research algorithm and when we bring to practice? These lessons could inspire and inform our fellow academics for the challenges practitioners face when bring these algorithms to production.
-
In the past year, at 904Labs A.I. for Search, we’ve put a lot of effort to optimize and push further the technology behind query intent/understanding engines. If you are in the search engine/information retrieval community, you know the term and how challenging the problem is. But if you are not familiar with the problem, it is hard to grasp its importance and challenges. Here’s my attempt to explain it in simple words.
A Query Intent/Understanding engine aims at identifying the intent of a user’s query and ultimately at translating it to a set of search directives.
Consider a user coming to your e-shop and typing in the search box: “red shoes”. The query may look pretty straightforward to you when it comes to what products to show to the user but, for a machine, it’s pretty hard to figure out what the person meant.
-
This year I talked at the industry track where I shared my experiences from running a search startup in the Netherlands. I received positive feedback, and it was good to catch up with old friends and meet new people. If you want a short recap from the latest and greatest trends in search technology, read on my summary on 904Labs blog.
