SAN BRUNO, Calif. — Wal-Mart Stores announced a new search engine named Polaris for Walmart.com to help shoppers browse and purchase items.
Built by @WalmartLabs, Wal-Mart’s research and technology hub based here, the engine uses semantic search technology to anticipate the intent of a shopper’s search to deliver highly relevant results for them, said Wal-Mart in its announcement. Walmart.com has seen an approximate 10% to 15% increase in shoppers completing a purchase after searching for a product using the new search engine.
Over the past few months, Walmart.com has migrated the site over to Polaris and it is now fully powered by the search engine. Polaris is also used for mobile search and will expand to power the company’s international e-commerce sites over the coming months.
Read more: Wal-Mart Pursues Multichannel Expansion
“Search is a crown jewel for any e-commerce company to own,” said Neil Ashe, president and chief executive officer of Walmart Global eCommerce, in a statement. “Today’s announcement underscores our commitment to owning technology that is fundamental in giving our millions of customers anytime, anywhere access to the products they want at the lowest prices.”
“With Polaris, we are giving users the ability to connect with the items they want but also surface items based on their interests and likely intent,” said Sri Subramaniam, vice president for @WalmartLabs and head of the Polaris initiative. “This is the start of what we imagine search to be as we continue to deliver products to accelerate Walmart’s global e-commerce efforts.”
