# 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

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_Source: PatentBrief — https://patentbrief.org. Patent facts are from public records; the plain-English explanation is PatentBrief's._