🔍 Search Meetup 🔍

In a digital age brimming with information, navigating vast data efficiently is crucial. Join us to explore search tech’s intricacies, algorithms, and tools powering modern search engines. We’ll delve into fundamentals, challenges, and cutting-edge advancements. Engage with experts, discuss semantic algorithms, AI integration, and more. Let’s unravel the art and science of search together!

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📚 Agenda – Hang tight, the fun-packed program is on the way! Stay tuned for more details.

17:30 Doors open

18:00 Food! (Optional)

19:00 Opening and welcome

19:05 Making learning-to-rank work for food e-commerce search – by Luuk Kaandorp and Dung Chu
Add-to-cart traffic from search plays a big role in e-commerce total traffic. Therefore search is an important tool helping customers doing shopping with Albert Heijn, both online and offline. AH search is traditionaly based on text matching in elastic search. We have recently built a new system based on learning-to-rank reranker, that works on top of elastic search. The reranker allows us to combine different features to improve search relevancy for customers. In this presentation, we talk about our experience in making learning-to-rank work for our use cases. A/B test results and lessons will be discussed.

19.35 On the Impact of Outlier Bias on User Clicks – by Arezoo Sarvi
Discover how outlier items influence user interactions in counterfactual learning to rank (CLTR). Our study unveils that users consistently favor outlier items, leading to a notable bias. We present the Outlier-Aware Position-Based Model (OPBM) as a remedy, demonstrating its superior performance in real-world and synthetic data experiments. Join us to explore the impact of outliers and unlock the potential of OPBM in enhancing ranking algorithms.

20:05 Break

20.20 Keeping up with reality: real time updates for search at bol.com – by Egbert van der Wal
It’s a common reply you can expect when asking about changes appearing in the webshop and apps: “it should be visible after the next index, in 2-3 hours”. We are working to change that to: “it should be visible in the next minute or so”. With Elasticsearch running in the cloud we started working on processing updates streaming using Dataflow. This poses new challenges like managing authentication, processing out-of-order updates and keeping search fast. During this talk I’ll explain these challenges and the way we deal with them.

20.55 Closing & End of Meetup

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Please keep in mind:

📅 RSVP Responsibly: Help us plan better by keeping your RSVP updated. It aids in organising waiting lists, capacity, and catering. Thank you!

🎉 In-Person Exclusive: We’re all about an engaging in-person meetup. No recordings, livestreams, or broadcasts – just good old face-to-face interactions!

📷 Photography/Video Consent: Albert Heijn will capture event moments for social media and promotions. By attending, you grant consent for photos and videos.

📍 Venue Directions: Join us at Provincialeweg 11. If traveling by train, it’s a quick 5-minute walk from Zaandam station. If driving, introduce yourself at the parking pole intercom at the back for smooth entry.

Search Engines Amsterdam

Information drives the planet. We organize talks around implementations of information retrieval, in search engines, in recommender systems, or in conversational assistants. Our meetups are usually held on the last Friday of the month, at Science Park Amsterdam. Usually, we have two talks in a row, one industrial, the other academic, 25+5 minutes each, no marketing, just algorithms, followed by drinks. We also host ad hoc “single shot” events whenever an interesting visitor stops and shares their work.

Organizations that have presented at SEA include 904Labs, Amsterdam Data Science, Beeld en Geluid, Blendle, Bol.com, Booking.com, Collaborne, Criteo, CWI, Delft University of Technology, Elasticsearch, Elsevier, Fredhopper, FuelUp, GoDataDriven, Google, Improve Digital, KBResearch, Marktplaats, Microsoft AI, MyDataFactory, Philips, Qualcomm, Sanoma, SDL, Seecr, SourcingThing, Spinque, Technical University Eindhoven, Textkernel, Tsinghua University, Trivago, University of Amsterdam, University of Glasgow, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, UserSat.com, WizeNoze, Yahoo!, Yandex, ZyLab.

This event is supported by the ELLIS unit Amsterdam.