Walmart Announces New Search Engine to Power Walmart.com

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

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Walmart has jumped into the world of high tech by introducing a new search engine for its website. The search engine called Polaris, was developed by Walmart’s own in-house team @WalmartLabs. Early testing on Polaris shows that the new search has increased online sales by 10-15%.

Searching for a shopping result is very different from conducting a general search. 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
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Good. The last search I did on Walmart.com was "pull-up bar" and I was getting more diaper results than relevant ones.
 
That's nice but it would be better if they just categorized more and gave more options when drilling down through a category. That's my major complaint with most stores online.
 
A ten to fifteen percent increase in completed sales with their new seach engine is pretty good. I bet the cost in development and implementation will be reclaimed pretty quickly at that rate even though their per sale margin is small.
 
Well the old one didn't work, period. I don't even think it's searches the db...it just generates random products.

I think they'd been better off going 3rd party. I can't imagine an in-house "walmart coding team" being very good. They probably pay them horribly and the only ones that stay are the ones that can't find work elsewhere.
 
An interesting investment for walmart, especially when they could have outsourced this. I wonder if they see this as part of taking on a much bigger share of the online sales market.
 
Good. Walmart's search engine left a lot to be desired.
I hope Amazon gets a clue, because I'm tired of all the irrelevant results there as well.
 
michilius said:
An interesting investment for walmart, especially when they could have outsourced this. I wonder if they see this as part of taking on a much bigger share of the online sales market.
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Yeah, I honestly didn't ever see Walmart hiring their own programmers to do this stuff. Seems it would have been more of an outsourced job.
 
Lethal said:
Yeah, I honestly didn't ever see Walmart hiring their own programmers to do this stuff. Seems it would have been more of an outsourced job.
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Walmart is probably doing the smart thing. Developing their online presence to compete with what Amazon is trying to become. It would be hard to take on that type of project outsourcing everything. Imagine if Walmart built their online inventory large enough to compete with Amazon. Then use their existing massive infrastructure to offer free next day in store pick up. Walmart could nearly crush any plans Amazon has of moving into a more local company.
 
john doe 182 said:
Walmart is probably doing the smart thing. Developing their online presence to compete with what Amazon is trying to become. It would be hard to take on that type of project outsourcing everything. Imagine if Walmart built their online inventory large enough to compete with Amazon. Then use their existing massive infrastructure to offer free next day in store pick up. Walmart could nearly crush any plans Amazon has of moving into a more local company.
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At that point they'd have to broaden their merchandise offerings to compete with Amazon's, and can't forget customer service. It's no small feat, but in time it could be done. and as we all know, competition is good for the consumer.
 
yup, competition is good. Bad search is always one of my greatest pet peeves with websites.
 
I wonder if they see this as just a way to beef up their website, or whether they would license what they create to others in some way?
 
Why don't they just implement Google custom search? :confused:
Even a Bing custom search (if it exists) would be a huge improvement over what they have now.
 
GushpinBob said:
Why don't they just implement Google custom search? :confused:
Even a Bing custom search (if it exists) would be a huge improvement over what they have now.
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Google's search benefits Google and doesn't take a uniquely WalMart approach to solving a problem. Also, when a company makes something like this and it works well for them, they can possibly license it and resell it to earn back some of the development costs. HP did it with their data warehouse software. In-house, HP built it to overcome internal company problems and, once they had it working, sold it to other companies.
 
The best search engine in the world won't fix the abysmal lack of information on many products. Specifically all the products whose form is their primary attribute but don't give dimensions.
 
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