Attaining fast and successful searches in E-commerce environments

Abstract

Current online stores suffer from a cardinal problem. There are too many products to offer, and customers find themselves lost due to the vast selection. As opposed to traditional stores, there is little or no guidance that helps the customers as they search. In this paper, we propose a new approach for searching in online stores. This approach is based on algorithms commonly used in recommendation systems, but which are rarely used for searches in online stores. We employ this approach for both keyword and browse searches, and present an implementation of this approach. We compared several search guide algorithms experimentally, and the experiments' results show that the suggested algorithms are applicable to the domain of online stores. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.