Blog

Promoting search results through the Boost feature

By Borja Santaolalla

BOOST- Promote the products you want in search The Boost feature in your Playboard is very a powerful tool, in fact, probably the most frequently used one among search merchandisers. Boosts allow you to promote products in search; that is, to push to the top of the search results page (i.e. SERP) any product from your catalogue, whether or not it contains the searched keyword.

Retail predictions for a fruitful 2019

By Angel Maldonado

Last year was a particularly poignant year for online retail and innovation. Social commerce continued to flourish with Instagram adding exciting new ways to shop on the app as well as influencing the success of online fast-fashion brands, Marks & Spencer ramped up its efforts to become a digital-first business with the launch of a “Data Fellowship”, an innovative skills initiative to create “the most data-literate leadership team in retail” and DFS launched a new augmented reality feature on iPhones to bring the lounge to life.  

Dear Retailers Give the gift of empathy this Christmas

By Angel Maldonado

The Christmas tree is up, tinsel decorates the living room and a fire blazes beautifully in the background. The presents start to mount under the tree as we near yuletide; the time for giving, the time for joy and the time for shared experiences is upon us.

eDisMax Query Parser — A parser to be going mad for?

Want to find what you’re looking for? Welcome to parser-dome, search warrior! For Solr to return the results you expect, you need your queries to have an understandable syntax. Depending on the parser you use to transform raw queries into Solr-compatible objects, those queries can be interpreted in different ways.

Understanding the basics of Akka HTTP

First of all, Akka http is not a framework, it’s not a skeleton to build your application or service upon. It is instead a suite of libraries that allow you to create a REST / HTTP interface to connect to your application.

Igniting the future of data with Apache Spark

By Edgar Herrero

Let’s face it, data has become a crucial and irreplaceable part of today’s society. Data sets of hundreds or thousands of GBs are routinely used, for example, by businesses trying to optimize their processes or even by entire industries looking for marketing trends and trying to predict the next big craze.

How to design effective data visualisations

By José Cabañeros

The value of data and data visualisations. Whether you’re writing an email, checking your tweets, streaming some music, or Googling life’s most important questions, such as “Can dogs see colours?”, these routine online actions generate large amounts of data. Usually, without us even being aware of it.

Getting Smart with Special Dates

By Angel Maldonado

With the World Cup and accompanying heatwave now a distant memory and summer clothes long buried at the back of the wardrobe, the work really begins for brands and retailers.

6 tips to improve onsite search in Mercadona Online

By Borja Santaolalla

Last week, I enjoyed reading ¿Por qué no hay SEO en Mercadona Online? or ‘Why is there no SEO on Mercadona Online?’. I sincerely applauded Jose Tarheel for openly sharing key insights on Mercadona’s product roadmap and digital strategy. Big kudos to his organisation for embracing a culture of transparency.

The Quest for the Holy Grail “eCommerce Search Happiness”

By Germán Heredia

Is it possible to achieve Search Happiness? As with everything in life, well ok almost everything, when you have something big to solve, the best solution is to follow the path of the partitioning algorithm.

How to be more creative

By Paula Natal

Let’s talk about the world of creativity and how to generate ideas. When we think of someone creative, the first thing that usually springs to mind is a person involved in the arts, design, decoration…we think of a person who creates objects or pieces usually related to arts and crafts. However, when we say that someone is very creative, we’re talking about originality and a unique character.

How do I “Build Products that People Love”?

By Angel Maldonado

When I attended Mind The Product 2018 recently in London I was excited by the slogan “Build Products People Love.” It got me contemplating as to what kind of thinking can deliver the right conditions to achieve such a goal?

Data visualisations Why you should be using a two-layer architecture

By Álvaro Díaz

Creación de visualizaciones de datos independientes del marco utilizando D3 y TypeScript

The Power of Site Search in Digital Marketing

By Olalla Salazar

We already know, or should know, that a good site search engine is proven to lift conversions. But what about its use as a means to drive, activate or monitor tailored marketing campaigns?

Synonyms in Solr I — The good, the bad and the ugly

By David Argüello

Synonyms is one of the most used tools in search as it allows users to manually fix boolean relevancy problems by being able to expand upon terms based on their equivalence. Using synonyms allow users to find documents through multiple terms that might not have been used in the original document definition.

Automated Testing for eCommerce

By Ana González

As part of EmpathyBroker’s QA team, our mission is to ensure that the user’s search and discovery experience in multiple eCommerce sites is of the highest quality.

The modern backend is here Kotlin

By Álvaro Panizo

Wait, you don’t know anything about the history of this new language? Then I suggest you take a minute to put “Kotlin” into your search bar and thousands of resources will appear on how JetBrains, with the support of Google, has developed one of the most modern and promising languages for backend stack.

How Spring Boot Autoconfiguration works?

It’s been a while since we adopted Spring Boot for some of our services and applications here at EmpathyBroker. You know how it goes, some annotations here, a few configurations over there and … voilà, a fresh new service ready to be deployed.

Seeing the web clearer

Colour-Blindness, also known as Daltonism or Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD), is a syndrome that affects around 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women worldwide, that’s around 318 million men and 18 million women, roughly 8% of the world’s population, the equivalent of the whole population of the United States of America!

Hello Search, this is me.

By Borja Santaolalla

Personalisation is a term I personally hate. ;) I’ve seen so much of it, so many broken promises from multiple enterprise software vendors throughout the last 10 years that I’ve just had enough. Well, enough disappointments let me add. However, we get “personalised” content and experiences every single day. Google, Amazon, Airbnb, Netflix, etc and yet, they don’t talk about it, they just do it and we enjoy it.

Improving Search Suggestions for eCommerce

By Alejandro Pérez

Suggestions are one of the key parts of any site search system. They’re the first interaction a user receives at the beginning of a search session but wait, what is a search suggestion? When a user starts writing a query inside a search box they usually expect to receive some kind of guidance and help in terms of what the search engine could find for them. This guidance is provided by search suggestions.

Git-flow Applied to a Real Project

Git-flow is a branching model for Git designed by Vincent Driessen to provide a wrapper around git commands that basically allows you to create branches. If you’re thinking about using this workflow, ask yourself the following question Which one of these photos represents you?

“You’ve sent a query to Solr but these aren’t the results you were looking for”

Debugging is the correct path to take when we need to find and resolve unexpected software behaviours and this is also the case, for example, when there’s a relevancy problem in Solr. Let’s imagine we create a Solr instance with a collection deployed to obtain all the documents containing “Darth Vader.” We start by building a query like

Creating better UX experiences through rapid prototyping

By Jorge Soto

At EmpathyBroker we focus on creating joyful customer experiences, helping our clients to select, mix and adapt our search engine functionality and features which are then completely integrated into any design or technology they may use.

How to Solve the Common Problems in Image Recognition

Most classification problems related to image recognition are plagued with well-known and established problems. For example, frequently there won’t be enough data to properly train a classification system, the data might have some underrepresented classes, and most commonly, working with unscrutinised data will imply working with poorly labelled data.

Looking into the use and benefits of Microservices

Microservices are a relatively new type of software development paradigm. They consist of services that run independently and autonomously but that have the ability to collaborate with each other to form a complete application ...

80% of Spaniards are Shopping More Online Now than a Year Ago

By Angel Maldonado

Last month we looked into some of the UK results from the international consumer research we conducted to explore online shopping habits across both the UK and Spain. In this article, we’re going to take a deeper dive into the results for Spain and the impact eCommerce is having on the Iberian Peninsula.

Our new Future visualisation - Detecting and predicting trends and behaviour

By Olalla Salazar

As part of our drive to make eCommerce search data more easily visible and actionable, our latest visualisation has been designed to detect trends within our main search performance indicators. And moreover, to be able to use these to predict future behaviour.

Incident detection and continuous monitoring in AWS

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is now in effect, aiming to oversee people’s Fundamental Rights regarding personal data processing, protection and portability.

The Impact of Automated Testing in QA Environments

By Ana González

The never-ending discussion of manual versus automated testing continues unabated in work environments when we face the challenge of controlling the quality of a product. This is because there is more than one way to perform a QA process with good results. The key is to find a quality control process that best suits the product we want to test and define the working methodology of the development and testing teams. This is what EmpathyBroker is putting into practice to improve its quality control process.

The influence of TF-IDF algorithms in eCommerce search

By David Argüello

At a basic level, information retrieval systems work by receiving a term and returning a set of documents relevant for that term. The magic that happens inside these systems is defined by algorithms that, relying on probability and statistical measures, are responsible for deciding which documents are relevant for a term and the ranking of those documents. One of these statistical measures is TF-IDF.

A voyage into the back-end

By Álvaro Panizo

Today the employment world of Software Engineering has become a fierce battle field characterized by the diversity of the weapons that each fighter brings to eliminate the competition. Education can fall short in a world in which each discipline requires years of experience to deepen the understanding of the concepts and their basis, turning the notion of a “jack of all trades and a master of none” on its head.

It's time to focus on site search and performance

By Olalla Salazar

eCommerce search has changed a lot in the last few years. Everyone´s experienced that feeling of frustration when using a search box to look for a specific product and not being able to find it, even when we know with certainty that the product exits in the catalogue. Fortunately, this feeling is becoming rarer these days. However, that doesn't mean that the problem has been completely resolved. Site search experience is much more than just avoiding the frustration a user feels when their expectations aren’t reached; it’s about achieving consistency, reliability and user happiness through the search box.

Let´s talk about Testing

By Jorge Gabriel

Frequently, and especially in social networks and technology forums, I come across essays on the principles of the methodology of testing. Among the different approaches, there are those who strongly defend manual testing against automatic tests, and then I also find many who throw away human testing to leave everything in the hands of the automated tests.

Scientists vs Dreamers in Product Management

By Angel Maldonado

Being data driven is considered a good thing, there is truth in it, but there is also truth in questioning it. There is danger in prioritising reason over unreason when it comes to exercising...

Why Findability is the only real metrics that matters and why we’ve evolved how we measure it

When you browse on an eCommerce site, you’re perhaps unaware of the amount of information you’re generating, and the same happens when you make a query on a search engine. All your activity, from the searches to the navigation to the add to cart, generates data which is extremely useful for online retailers. What’s more, this information often forms a basis for the decisions they take to improve their site and services.

“How to use customer obsession to build products that delight”

By Angel Maldonado

I had the personal pleasure to attend and host our first ProductTank meet-up in Barcelona last week with guest speaker Jeff Gothelf, author of Lean UX and Sense and Respond, and organised by Gino Micacchi. 

Summer Sales Outpace Black Friday

By Germán Heredia

The summer sales period can witness some of the busiest shopping days of the year for particular retailers, generating high traffic, high buying intent and a high emotional sentiment from consumers, and this year certainly didn’t disappoint.

THE FUTURE OF AI IS PEOPLE

By Angel Maldonado

Why AI has become a cherished part of digital and how creativity will dictate its future.

The Challenging Dimensions of Image Recognition (2º part)

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have been gaining traction and popularity over the last few years, and beyond Google’s tech scene. As eCommerce continues to grow at such an electric pace, we see more and more features, from recommendations and search ranking to alert systems, that are driven by deep learning and artificial intelligence technologies.