Andreas Wagner

Background

Andreas Wagner is a search expert at SearchHub who authors the “Three Pillars of Search Quality in E-commerce” series. His framework organizes e-commerce search quality into three independent but related pillars.

Key Contribution: Three Pillars Framework

Wagner’s framework for e-commerce search quality:

1. Findability — can users find what they’re looking for at all?

   • Zero results, spelling correction, synonym coverage
   • Measured by: zero results rate, task success rate

2. Ranking / Relevance — are the results in the right order?

   • NDCG, precision, conversion correlation
   • Measured by: NDCG@k, CTR by rank

3. Discovery & Inspiration — do users find things they didn’t know they wanted?

   • Diversity Metrics, serendipity, exploration
   • Measured by: discovery rate, basket size, session depth

Each pillar requires different optimization strategies and different metrics — a system can excel at findability but fail at discovery.

Articles in Vault

• Three Pillars of Search Quality in E-commerce Part 1 Findability
• Three Pillars of Search Quality - Discovery and Inspiration — Discovery pillar: diversity, product exposure, multi-objective ranking
• Common Pitfalls of Onsite Search Experimentation

Topics

• Search Result Diversity — MICES talk on result positioning and basket composition; Discovery pillar framework

Affiliation

• searchHub

Related People

• Daniel Tunkelang — overlapping quality framework
• Doug Turnbull — shared e-commerce search focus

Related Concepts

• Search Evaluation — three pillars provide structure
• Diversity Metrics — discovery pillar
• NDCG — ranking/relevance pillar
• Query Understanding — findability pillar