Understanding customers using their search queries

Bol.com - Techlab

Imagine you want to buy something. You go to bol.com and you start typing the article in the search bar. Automatically you will be served suggestions and as a result, you want a limited number of articles from our 30 million products catalogue.
What this episode covers
You select the product you want, press the buy button and there it is, at your doorstep at the selected moment.

Sounds simple, right?

Inspired by a talk of our guest of this episode earlier this year, we wanted to find out what's behind the search bar. We wanted to understand search queries. Simple at first glance, but when we dive into it we found out it's way more complex than you might think.

We had great learning: as a customer, I help other customers to improve their search results. How that works? Listen to this episode.

(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/bd51783981f1b35051359902ea03bea2213d1a9f-680x361.jpg)

The search bar on the bol.com website

What it takes to search

Questions will be answered like:

• How do I search for a product?
• We are not talking about the Google Search Engine and SEO and why we do not use Google Search?
• How important is search?
• What happens when you type in a search query?
• Terms you need to understand when we talk about search: relevancy, ranking/sorting, first page, tail page.
• What items do you need to take into account: Spelling, Target Category, Filter values, Broadness.
• How do we take trending topics into account?
• As an International Engineer, is it hard to work on a search engine with Dutch Product Content?

Guests

• Nikolai Bogdanov – Software Engineer in the Buying domain – Help me find.

Notes

• Spaces summit Talk on Youtube
• The search result of the red water kettle as given in the example
• Search via Voice is different, check this episode for more detail