Most people use the online E-commerce search engines for exploration and product discovery. The relevance of products displayed by product search engines varies considerably across different platforms.
A customer interacts with a product search engine by typing a string in the search box often known as the query. Most product search engines rely on matching user-typed keywords and product titles. However, it is well known that simple keyword-based filtering is unlikely to find semantically related products. For illustration, consider a user-supplied query “backyard sitting.” A simple keyword-matching system will ignore products such as “outdoor chair” or “outdoor bench” as they are not keyword matches. Even after missing these relevant products, the search engine will likely find hundreds of products for user-supplied keywords. However, showing all those results can frustrate the customer by showing a lot of irrelevant items.