The team just released changes to the live site that boost customer-perceived relevance by increasing the number of query results with images.  The table below summarizes the improvement.  Why aren’t there 100% images in the top results?  The reason is largely because many sites, including very reputable merchants like Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, and AceHardwareSuperStore.com, block image crawling bots or seriously throttle them.  We will have to work with these sites to address these issues, but the latest improvements in the number of Product Search top results with images are already quite significant.

• Percent of Top Results with Images (Before): 79.2%
• Percent of Top Results with Images (After): 88.6%
• Improvement: +9.4%

A before (top) and after (bottom) comparison is pictured below.  Note that not all results are as relevant and image packed as highlighted at right but this is a good example.

This update, in addition to continued improvements in our selection from both crawl and the Product Upload Beta, is one example of how we are improving Product Search relevance.  This begs the question: how do you measure relevance?

For Product Search, we look at a number of factors including the following.

• Is the product what the user was looking for given the query?  To a computer program, this is not always obvious.  Consider the query “speaker”.  This result is probably not what the user was looking for even though the search engine may think so because it contains an exact match on the query keyword.

• Is there a product image?  Given two similar results where one has an image and the other does not, we find that users often prefer the result with an image.  This is where our latest change helps improve relevance.
• Is the merchant reputable?  Given several results for similar products, users would probably prefer a result from a well-known merchant such as Amazon.com over a result from a small online shop that they’re never purchased from before.