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Senior ML Engineer
Jun 12th 2020 ai
AI is a key part of Algolia’s strategy. We are continually investing in AI to enhance and extend our existing battle-tested solutions to the most complex problems in search. With 1 trillion searches per year touching 1 in 6 web users every day, and more than 9,000 customers, we have access to a powerful dataset that enables us to develop the most comprehensive suite of intelligent automation capabilities in the market, while maintaining our stringent data privacy policies.
Search is a complex problem that can be an important business differentiator. As Doug Turnbull, author of “Relevant search” and a prominent relevance expert put it: “Delivering a truly relevant search experience has been elusive, if not a critical blind spot for most organizations.” Even market leaders in consumer-grade search like Netflix and Amazon struggle to optimize and tune their search results with their AI stack.
Building great search requires companies to evolve their relevance by solving multiple problems:
In order for AI to be applied successfully, it needs to solve for each of the above problems, while ensuring that all AI algorithms work well holistically. In other words: to provide quality consumer-grade search that drives measurable business results, companies need a comprehensive approach to AI.
This is why Algolia has built a family of AI algorithms that solve the most important aspects of search. Think of it as an AI studio for search: a group of solutions to most complex search problems, packaged inside an easy-to-use and flexible API. This unique approach applies state-of-the-art practices for each specific need — be it an industry, company, use case, or partner solution — to help our customers achieve more in less time.
In 2020, we continue to enhance our existing AI practices and expand to new ones:
Our vision is to be able to use any type of custom AI algorithm with Algolia. The first step we released in this direction is to efficiently handle millions of rules in our engine; our customers can use those rules as the output of their AI algorithms to rerank results, promote categories, etc.
We clearly state what AI features do, where and how they impact the experience, and we clearly state how they work alongside other features. We made sure that our customers have transparency on how their relevance is computed, as opposed to having to blindly trust an algorithm that they don’t understand. We dub this the white box approach and we believe it is key to keep customers empowered, educated on the insights of an iterative approach, and trustful of Algolia.
A white box approach is critical for enabling continuous improvement. If a company cannot tell you why results are ranked in a particular order, it will be impossible for you to test alternative ways to tune and improve the results.
We will continue to explore, develop, and broaden our AI studio: the suite of integrated algorithms to help our customers harness the power of AI, while keeping ease of use and flexibility as design principles.
For example, we are a launch partner with OpenAI to bundle their technology on top of our search engine. The goal is to be able to provide the answers to user questions, in addition to a list of results that the user needs to analyze (similar to what Google is doing on a query like “Why did Franklin Roosevelt support the formation of the UN” ). You can imagine how this technology would be useful in the context of a help center, with significant impact on reducing support cost, or for news organizations to keep readers coming back for the latest facts.
We are evaluating many other AI solutions, including, but not limited to:
As AI continues to mature, we continue our work to reduce search complexity and enable our customers to provide the best search and discovery experiences to their users. And as natural language processing (NLP) becomes better at analyzing intent, we will get closer to the ideal of a two-way dialogue in conversational search. Eventually, we humans will interact with software like we would with a human assistant. Stay tuned as Algolia paves the roadmap to this not-so-distant scenario.
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