E-commerce search is special. For us, a Lucene search is a Boolean information retrieval model based on the vector space model. However, for an end user, or a customer, any search on an e-commerce website is supposed to be simple. A customer would not make a field-specific search but will focus on what he or she wants from the search.

Suppose a customer is looking out for a pink sweater. The search that will be conducted on the e-commerce website will be pink sweater instead of +color:pink +type:sweater—using the Solr query syntax. It is our search that will have to figure out how to provide results to the customer so that whatever is being searched for is available to the customer. The problem with e-commerce website searches is that most of the searches happen with the idea that the results are to be retrieved from bag of words or plain text documents. However, it is important for us to categorize and rank the results so that whatever is being searched for...