# 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. - **Patent:** US 11593558 - **Original title:** Deep hybrid neural network for named entity recognition - **Owner:** eBay Inc - **Granted:** 2023 - **Status:** Active - **Times cited:** 2 - **Field:** ai_ml, software, ecommerce ## What it does 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 does NOT 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. ## Real-world examples 1. eBay search query processing 2. Automated product category tagging in e-commerce 3. Brand-aware query expansion for online marketplaces ## 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. ## Frequently asked questions ### What does How eBay Uses AI to Identify Brands in Search Queries cover? A system that uses deep learning to recognize brand names in search queries and automatically improve search results by adding relevant product terms. ### Who owns patent US 11593558? eBay Inc owns this patent, granted in 2023. ### When does this patent expire? This patent is expected to expire on February 28, 2043, when the invention enters the public domain. ### What is patent US 11593558 cited by? This patent has been cited by 2 later patents that build on its ideas. ### What problem does this patent solve? 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. ### What does this patent NOT cover? Does not cover general-purpose entity recognition that is not tied to a search query augmentation process. **Full plain-English explainer:** https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/11593558/no-language-left-behind-nllb **Original patent:** https://patents.google.com/patent/US11593558 --- _Source: PatentBrief — https://patentbrief.org. Patent facts are from public records; the plain-English explanation is PatentBrief's._ ## Related patents Semantically similar inventions in the PatentBrief corpus: - [How Groupon Automatically Categorizes Merchant Services Using Text Analysis](https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/9330167/amazon-rds) — A system that automatically scans merchant websites and uses high-precision search queries to label their services, helping platforms like Groupon organize thousands of business listings. - [How eBay Uses Image Fingerprints to Search for Products](https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/8825660/sql-server) — A system that lets you search for items on a marketplace by uploading a photo instead of typing text, using image 'fingerprints' to find matching products. - [How Facebook Uses Deep Learning to Predict What You Might Like](https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/10402750/automl-neural-architecture-search) — A method for training AI models to recommend new content by comparing a user's past interactions with unseen items in a social network. - [How Computers Use Memory Networks to Answer Questions](https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/10664744/watson-question-answering-system-deepqa) — A method for AI to search through large amounts of stored information by repeatedly 'hopping' through memory to find the most relevant facts for answering a question. - [Teaching Computers to Understand Document Similarity Using AI](https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/10909459/federated-learning) — This patent describes a way to train a computer program (a neural network) to understand how similar documents are to each other, by showing it examples and teaching it to group similar ones together and separate dissimilar ones.