Search System over e-Commerce Data for Business Users

Abstract

Web search engines such as Google and Bing provide an easy and convenient way to find web pages that contain input keywords. This provides a user-friendly interface for non-technical users to explore the Web and find relevant data among thousands of Web pages. While numerous advancement has been made to store e-commerce data in the cloud, we have not seen great advancement in terms of search over such data. E-commerce data is usually stored as structured data in relational and graph databases. Thus, an answer to a query keyword is composed of different pieces of data stitched together. As of now, the main method to find answers over this structured data is through predefined search forms. However, these search forms are limited, and developing a new search form is time consuming and expensive. In this work, we present an easy way to explore structured e-commerce data for business users that eliminate the dependency to predefined forms. The new search system is similar to Google, in which the interface is essentially a text box, and non-technical business users enter input keywords into the system. The output is a portion of the data, that covers the input keywords. We propose a new ranking strategy based on machine learning to rank more relevant answers ahead of less relevant ones. Our experiments show this ranking strategy is successful in returning relevant answers.