Algolia Unveils AI-powered Query Categorization to Turbo-Charge Online Business Operations

AI-based intent understanding further boosts revenue conversions by as much as 22% by automatically filtering and boosting on predicted categories

Algolia, the world’s only end-to-end AI Search and Discovery platform, today unveiled its latest innovation, AI-powered Query Categorization, which automatically associates a query with the appropriate category (or categories). As the only company providing this powerful, new capability, Algolia enables merchandisers, business users and non-tech practitioners in e-commerce or media companies to better understand their consumers’ intent as they begin a search for items, which ultimately drives higher conversions and revenue. Additionally, Query Categorization enables them to operationalize their strategies across entire product categories more efficiently in only a few clicks to accurately predict the correct category associated with search queries helping create time-savings and further cost reductions.

Using customer interaction data and leveraging advanced AI algorithms, Query Categorization can automatically predict the true intent behind users’ queries and connect to the correct categories of products. The AI model is trained by each product catalog and its users, producing the best results for each specific business. This significantly reduces the setup and ongoing maintenance of online product catalogs by developers, product managers, and non-tech practitioners.

Coupled with recently launched Algolia NeuralSearch, Query Categorization offers tremendous value for business users. With increased precision (accuracy) and enhanced recall (completeness) of search results, supported by accurate and autonomous prediction of the most relevant product categories, online companies can now virtually eliminate ‘null results’ for their consumers.

Query Categorization is a significant equalizer for many companies that compete with large, established industry players, like Big Box retailers, without large teams of data scientists and AI experts. In many instances, these organizations attempt to ‘do it alone’ and imitate big players by building highly manual processes to sort search results and match them with ranked products and categories. However, Query Categorization solves this problem in only a few clicks and empowers these organizations to dynamically map queries to aligned categories and, importantly, at enterprise scale.

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Query Categorization delivers accurate and contextually relevant information, which makes it easier for consumers to find what they’re looking for quickly and effortlessly, thereby improving the customer experience. It includes the following additional key benefits:

• A dedicated section in the Algolia UI (user interface) to set up AI models and explore predictions in an easy and intuitive fashion;
• Automatic filtering and boosting on predicted categories using a no-code environment that business users and non-tech practitioners can control directly to increase the relevance of their user’s results;
• Full control is retained by merchandisers over Query Categorization, and they can modify any categorizations made by the AI model;
• Analytics available in the UI that are grouped by predicted category to learn how the categories perform and to detect underperforming queries;
• Access to category predictions at query time (with the Search API) so that a personalized Search and Discovery experience can be provided for consumers.

Bharat Guruprakash, chief product officer, Algolia, noted: “We are incredibly excited to introduce Query Categorization to our customers. It represents our relentless commitment to continuous innovation and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Using AI, Query Categorization automatically and accurately predicts the product categories associated with a consumer’s specific query and then connects to the right products based on the online business catalog or content, whether it is an e-commerce site, movie app, or other content collection. For example, a query for ‘milk chocolate’ will be connected to a category comprising chocolates, whilst ‘chocolate milk’ will be connected to a category of dairy products, and a query for ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ will be connected to a movie category.”

Moreover, it helps optimize “long tail” queries by connecting consumers with the most relevant categories – an important attribute in situations where there may be many thousands of similar products or SKUs that are searched for infrequently or often incorrectly categorized.

Guruprakash added: “Online businesses will see an increase in top-line revenue. For instance, a UK online grocery chain gained upwards of 15% revenue boost after only 2 months when using Query Categorization in production. Additionally, a Swiss department store chain experienced a 22% increase in their CVR (conversion rate) from 4.23% to 5.17% after two weeks of use.”

Query Categorization is generally available as part of Algolia’s ‘Build’, ‘Premium’ and ‘Elevate’ pricing plans. Further information about the product can be found here.

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