Walmart.com using new search engine with semantic search technology; seeing 10% to 15% increase in completed purchases

Bentonville, Ark. -- Walmart announced a new search engine for Walmart.com. The new engine, named Polaris, was developed by a small team within @Wamart Labs, the research and technology hub for innovation at Walmart. It uses semantic search technology to anticipate the intent of a shopper's search to deliver highly relevant results for them.



The company said Walmart.com has already seen an approximate 10-15% increase in shoppers completing a purchase after searching for a product using the new search engine. Over the past few months, Walmart.com has migrated the site over to Polaris and it is now fully powered by the search engine. Polaris is also used for mobile search and will expand to power the company's international e-commerce sites over the coming months.



"Search is a crown jewel for any e-commerce company to own," said Neil Ashe, president and CEO of Walmart Global eCommerce. "Today's announcement underscores our commitment to owning technology that is fundamental in giving our millions of customers anytime, anywhere access to the products they want at the lowest prices."



Polaris is based on the Social Genome project, a platform that connects people to places, events and products giving Walmart a richer level of understanding about customers and products. The new search engine uses advanced algorithms including query understanding and synonym mining to glean user intent in delivering results.