How eBay Uses AI to Identify Brands in Search Queries

A system that uses deep learning to recognize brand names in search queries and automatically improve search results by adding relevant product terms.

What it covers

This system improves search accuracy by teaching a computer to understand that certain words in a search query belong together as a single brand name. It first breaks down words into individual characters using a deep neural network to understand their structure, then combines this with pre-trained word knowledge. It uses a bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) to look at the context of the whole sentence, and finally applies conditional random fields to pick the most likely label for each word. For example, if a user searches for 'Nike running shoes', the system identifies 'Nike' as a brand and may automatically add terms like 'apparel' or 'gear' to the search to return better results.

What it doesn't cover

• —Does not cover general-purpose entity recognition that is not tied to a search query augmentation process.
• —Does not cover systems that identify entities without using both character-level convolutional layers and bidirectional LSTMs.
• —Does not cover search augmentation that does not rely on the specific output of a sequential conditional random field classifier.

The clever bit

The system combines character-level information (the shape and structure of the word) with word-level embeddings (the meaning of the word), allowing the model to recognize brand names it has never seen before based on their character patterns.

Why it matters

In e-commerce, search is the primary way users find products. If a search engine fails to understand that 'New Balance' is a brand rather than a description of a person's physical state, the user gets irrelevant results. This patent describes a specific technical pipeline for ensuring that large-scale search platforms can accurately parse brand-specific intent to drive sales.

Real-world examples

• 1.eBay search query processing
• 2.Automated product category tagging in e-commerce
• 3.Brand-aware query expansion for online marketplaces