Andre Yoskowitz
6 May 2012 21:30
eBay has confirmed plans to upgrade their search engine to better compete against e-tailing giant Amazon.
"Amazon is on version 8.0 of search. EBay is at 2.0, but they are thinking about how they make this huge leap to 3.0," says Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor. ChannelAdvisor helps merchants sell more online.
eBay's search tech, dubbed "Voyager," has seen a complete overhaul in the last four years after the hiring of Mark Carges as CTO. He hired 100 new employees to bring the total to 150, including several prominent engineers from Microsoft's Bing.
For 2013, the company is working on "Cassini,' the third version of the search engine. Cassini "will trawl full product descriptions, rather than just the titles of listings, and match search queries to photographs of products, while taking into account information about the seller and the buyer," explains Reuters.
Additionally, the new update will take into account past purchases and browsing, making it more tailored to their intent. "Voyager is pretty literal. It takes a query and matches it faithfully against the title of items. It's not intuitive," notes Carges. "Cassini will take the user's query and understand that."