As the leading shopping search engine in Europe, Kelkoo faces a similar challenge as all other search engines: how to achieve 100% precise results with a search system that is simple to implement and maintain. The challenge is all the more complex in the e-commerce sector where databases containing product information are not necessarily organised in a structured manner (unlike information on patents, for example, where the data is normally highly structured).
Jean-Marc Potdevin, Kelkoo V.P. Engineering Europe explains,
“Precision and relevancy are of paramount importance to Kelkoo. We have successfully maintained our market leadership through continued investment in our technology. After testing several solutions, we chose Sight’Up technology because it meets our needs perfectly. Unlike other technologies, Taggis uses self-learning and does not rely on management rules or dictionaries. Sight’Up tools will helps us match the 100s of millions of products we provide prices and product details for cover with precision and keep our results up-to date as soon as new products become available.”
No computer knowledge is required to use Taggis. In designing its system, Sight’Up made sure that people do not need expertise in computers to handle it easily. All users need is some basic knowledge about the product families they have to manage, and some common sense.
Traditional search engines will take the above text and display results on “black dress”, whereas Taggis only provides results that actually correspond to the on-line shopper’s request for a special type of red dress.
The goal is for machines to be able to reproduce the behaviour of in-store salespeople when they try to find goods that are as close as possible to a customer’s request. With Taggis, artificial intelligence is really at work.
Franck Bigalet, Sight’Up Founder and CEO adds,
“For years, search engines in e-commerce have been dominated by two main schools: linguistic approaches that use dictionaries, and statistical approaches. Despite the undeniable contributions of these technologies, they have now reached their limits in addressing increasingly complex search issues. That is why we pushed to achieve a technology breakthrough, designing a product characteristic extraction engine and other products based on a self-learning system. Particularly well suited for e-commerce, Taggis meets Kelkoo’s requirements and opens the door to a new era of on-line price comparison, a sector in which the concentration of leaders is growing stronger.”
Kelkoo Project Director Gilles Vandelle concludes, “Throughout this project, Sight’Up teams impressed us with their ability to innovate and get involved with our efforts. We have created a true partnership with Sight’Up. The positive experience of working with Sight ‘Up’s Taggis product has given us the confidence to begin using their automatic glossary construction engine: as well”
About Kelkoo
Kelkoo.com was founded in 2000, following mergers with Zoomit.com, Dondecomprar.com and Shopgenie.com. Within 2 years of launching, Kelkoo became Europe’s largest e-commerce website after Amazon and Ebay and the largest shopping search and comparison site both in the UK and Europe.
In April 2004 Kelkoo was acquired by leading global Internet company Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO). Kelkoo is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo! Inc.
Kelkoo now operates in 10 European countries and reaches over 11 million users across Europe (Nielsen NetRatings)
Kelkoo operates the shopping channel of MSN across Europe, the Ask Jeeves Product Search in the UK and Yahoo! Shopping in all Yahoo!’s European markets. Kelkoo also provides a travel search and comparison service for Yahoo! Travel in UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain and for AOL Travel in the UK.
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