Shopify

E-commerce platform powering 2M+ merchant stores. Internally operates the Shopify Help Center search (2M+ visits/month) and provides search infrastructure for merchants.

Search & Evaluation Work

Help Center search (B2B knowledge base):

  • Evaluation framework: Kafka events (streaming behavioral data) + expert annotation by Shopify Support team
  • Offline metrics: MAP, NDCG
  • Online metrics: CTR, average rank of clicked result, abandonment, deflection (user resolved without contacting support)
  • Moved from Vanilla Pagerank to Query-specific Pagerank (boosts historically clicked results for similar queries) → significant CTR, rank, and deflection improvements

Relevance cutoff research (Finding the Relevance Cutoff - When to Stop Showing Search Results):

  • Progressive scroll UX requires evaluating the full result set, not just top-N
  • Developed Variable Precision, F1, and Time Well Spent metrics for this scenario

Key Articles