Query suggestion for E-commerce sites

Query suggestion module is an integral part of every search engine. It helps search engine users narrow or broaden their searches. Published work on query suggestion methods has mainly focused on the web domain. But, the module is also popular in the domain of e-commerce for product search. In this paper, we discuss query suggestion and its methodologies in the context of e-commerce search engines. We show that dynamic inventory combined with long and sparse tail of query distribution poses unique challenges to build a query suggestion method for an e-commerce marketplace. We compare and contrast the design of a query suggestion system for web search engines and e-commerce search engines. Further, we discuss interesting measures to quantify the effectiveness of our query suggestion methodologies. We also describe the learning gained from exposing our query suggestion module to a vibrant community of millions of users.