Walmart.com Unveils New Search Engine

Walmart announces a new search engine for Walmart.com to help millions of shoppers browse, discover and purchase items in an easy, fast and intuitive manner. Built from the ground up by @WalmartLabs, the research and technology hub for innovation at Walmart, the engine uses semantic search technology to anticipate the intent of a shopper’s search to deliver highly relevant results.

 

Walmart.com has already seen an approximate 10 percent to 15 percent increase in shoppers completing a purchase after searching for a product using the new search engine.

 

Named Polaris, the new search engine was developed by a small team within @WalmartLabs and completed in ten months. The group includes experts in information retrieval, machine learning and text mining with experience from top search and e-commerce companies and renowned research institutions.

 

Over the past few months, Walmart.com has migrated the site over to Polaris and it is now fully powered by the search engine. Polaris is also used for mobile search and will expand to power the company’s international e-commerce sites over the coming months.

 

“Search is a crown jewel for any e-commerce company to own,” says Neil Ashe, president and CEO of Walmart Global eCommerce. “[This] announcement underscores our commitment to owning technology that is fundamental in giving our millions of customers anytime, anywhere access to the products they want at the lowest prices.”

 

The new search engine uses advanced algorithms including query understanding and synonym mining to glean user intent in delivering results. When a user types in the word “denim,” it returns results on jeans, for example.

 

Polaris also focuses on engagement understanding, which takes into account how a user is behaving with the site to surface the best results for them. It delivers a new and intuitive results page when browsing for topics instead of giving a standard list of search results allowing shoppers to discover new items they may not have considered. When a user types in “patio furniture,” for example, they get a colorful page with multiple patio set options for the backyard along with a banner showing featured items on sale.

 

The @WalmartLabs team continues to evolve Polaris and is working on new advances that will be rolled into Walmart.com.