Will AI take over your search bar?

There are not many places left where AI isn’t trying to sneak in. Will the search bar on your favorite webshops be one of the next places where you encounter AI?

We have met with our Chief Product Officer, Lene Damgaard Madsen, to hear how the on-site search experience is evolving in these AI times.

Will all searches be influenced by AI in the future?​​​​​​​

"The short answer is no, not all searches. Search as we know it today is still relevant and effective. Search fundamentally is about quickly and accurately finding the most relevant search result that matches the customer's needs. Traditional keyword and hybrid search are still very effective in many cases, so the search bar as we know it is definitely not passé. That being said, the search bar will almost certainly be able to do more than it can today."

How will the search bar evolve?

"The search bar will need to better understand customers' intentions and preferences. If the customer wants to find a product they already know about – it could be a pair of socks from a specific brand – keyword search already works excellently. But if the customer instead writes a question like 'Which socks, should I choose for my child?', AI opens entirely new possibilities for the search bar. Here, AI can help the user become clearer about their needs and requirements and then provide relevant product suggestions that match the customer's exact needs."

Would AI then be built into the search bar as a kind of chatbot?

"One could easily imagine that, but the search bar must be able to distinguish between when it is necessary to ask AI for help and when it is not. AI is fast, but it is still not as fast as the search techniques we know and use today – and it is much more resource-intensive. It means that important logic needs to be built into the search bar so that it does not start solving simple tasks with heavy AI tools."

How would a chatbot in the search bar work?

"It is, of course, a UX task to solve optimally, but it should not solely be a chat interface where you write long sentences back and forth, as you know it from, for example, ChatGPT today. Some search tasks require more help for the user to narrow down and specify their needs, and it is not hard to imagine the AI agent asking you questions like: 'Did you mean this or that?' and then giving you two options where you just have to press a button instead of writing a lengthy response.

Chat is not necessarily a very effective search technique because you must type all the words on your keyboard or phone, or talk to your webshop, maybe in public. And everyone who has chatted with an AI agent knows that you can easily end up in a dead end. That is obviously not optimal when you, as an e-retailer, want to give your customers a good search experience."

What can AI help with in e-commerce searches?

"The search bar can be the starting point for your interaction with an e-commerce site if you do not really know what you are looking for. For example, if you need to find a gift for a teenager worth 35 €, you can write directly in the search bar, after which it might come up with three product suggestions. If you do not like any of them, you can get three new ones or write again and narrow down the categories, brands, or preferences that the search should be based on. Here, as with so much else about AI, it is probably a question of where the imagination sets limits. But like so much else about AI, it is also a question of using artificial intelligence thoughtfully and not throwing away all the great tools we already have."

Are you working to integrate AI into your search engine?

"Yes, but we do it modularly. AI should not answer all search queries. It should be used where a sufficiently good answer cannot be found with the existing search tools. We use AI on several levels. For example, we use it to create related tags and expand the algorithm's language understanding so that it knows that socks and stockings are semantically almost the same. AI is an incredibly exciting technology, and we use all the AI we can see adds value for our users."

So when will we chat with an AI in our search bar?

"AI has already begun to integrate into the search experience, and it is only a matter of time before we see AI chat or more interactive conversations between customers and AI as a natural part of the search experience. It is more a question of how it is best integrated. Customers still primarily expect quick and relevant search results, and that will sometimes mean that AI needs to be put into play and other times that we deliver the result with the already existing technologies."