Search is critical to the customer experience at Wayfair. What we show on the first page of results is incredibly important for users. The graph below shows what many people might already know when it comes to browsing and search habits: The majority of customers rarely look beyond the products…
Come find us! Next week, Wayfair Data Science will be hitting the road. Data scientists and engineers from across our teams will be attending the SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as well as the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Stockholm, Sweden. Here…
Next week, Wayfair Data Science will be at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Salt Lake City. We’re bringing data scientists and engineers from several different teams, plus a VR rig to try out the shopping experience of the future (come find us at booth 224!). We pride…
Last year, Wayfair launched Visual Search, a new and novel way to find products on our website. Users can now upload photos of furniture they like and find visually similar matches in an instant. If you need a little refresher on this technology, the original blog post can be found…
Multiple recommendation systems at Wayfair use collaborative filtering based models to understand user behavior and identify like-minded customers. Despite its success, collaborative filtering has a few significant drawbacks, such as the cold start problem and a limited scope of recommendable products. By leveraging image based product embeddings, Wayfair has created…
Search has long been an essential tool for Wayfair that enables users to discover products among millions. While we offer great text and faceted search, those features can only go so far. It can be difficult to precisely describe an item in mind, especially in a way search engines can…
That’s a heat map of 3 months of Wayfair North American orders, exported via Logstash from our relational orders database into Elasticsearch, and visualized with Kibana 4. For some time now, ELK, or Elasticsearch / Logstash / Kibana, has been our opensource platform for text-based log messages, complemented by Graphite…
On the search and recommendations team at Wayfair, we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated men and women of the world. We have speakers of French, Chinese, Hebrew, German and Persian in the crew. Some of us host couchsurfers at our swanky apartments, and then turn around and couchsurf…
Me: Doug, what are you doing? Doug: Solving the problem of class struggle with one of Greg’s classifiers. Me: Karl Marx should call his office. What do you mean by that? Doug: Let me explain… Class struggle at Wayfair search used to manifest itself as searches for ‘red cups’ that returned…
We use the Apache SOLR search platform behind the scenes at Wayfair. Sometimes, when vanilla SOLR doesn’t quite do what we want, we improve it for our purposes. When we suspect that others might have the same purposes, and we think that we have solved our problems in a generally…
