Rethink e-Commerce Search

The quality of the search experience on an e-commerce site plays a critical role in customer conversion and the growth of the e-commerce business. In this talk, I will discuss the current status and challenges of product search. In particular, I will highlight the significant amount of effort it takes to create a high-quality product search engine using classical information retrieval methods. Then, I will discuss how recent advances in NLP and deep learning, especially the advent of large pre-trained language models, may change the status quo. While embedding-based retrieval has the potential to improve classical information retrieval methods, creating a machine learning-based, end-to-end system for general-purpose, web search is still extremely difficult. Nevertheless, I will argue that product search for e-commerce may prove to be an area where deep learning can create the first disruption to classical information retrieval systems.