Ghosting: contextualized inline query completion in large scale retail search

Abstract

Query auto-completion presents a ranked list of queries as suggestions for a user-entered prefix. Ghosting is the process of auto-completing a search recommendation by highlighting the suggested text inline within the search box. We propose the use of a behavior-based recommendation model along with customer search context to ghost on high-confidence queries. We tested ghosting on a retail production system, on over 140 million search sessions. We found that session-context based ghosting significantly increased the acceptance of offered suggestions by 6.18%, reduced misspellings among searches by 4.42%, and improved net sales by 0.14%.