Why e-commerce search is so bad and what may soon fix it

At the website of one of the largest consumer electronics e-retailers, a search for “beer cooler” returns a bounty of more than 500 relevant results, but a search for “beer chiller” delivers not even one. Type in “something to cool beer” and the only result you get is a Lego set.

Conduct the same exercise on Google or Bing and the experience is quite different. The two most popular engines seem to understand that “cooler” and “chiller” are synonymous, and it even performs pretty well on the “something to cool” test.

What do the search engine giants know that e-commerce sites don’t? The difference is “vector search,” a technology rooted in artificial intelligence research that represents information as numbers rather than text.

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