Content understanding IS Query understanding

A user searches for red shoes, they click on some products. Now you have a set of relevant products. Great!

But what can you do with it? You could literally memorize these amazing results and show them to future users. Maybe that’s the right thing to do.

But we can take it up a notch.

Now imagine those products have attributes. Like color. We observe: eighty percent of red shoe’s clicked products have colors ['red', 'maroon', 'pink', 'rose'] .

Now you’ve understood something about red shoes . You’ve mapped a query to not just products, but to an attribute. You’ve created a query → color mapping.

Can you use it?

You can use it IF you trust this product color classification. That’s why content understanding IS query understanding:

1. Understand content (extract attributes)
2. Map query → product relevance
3. Remember query → relevant product attributes

That’s the START of your query understanding journey. After that you can get fancier. But it always starts with categorizing your content first.

-Doug

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