During 2022 & early 2023, OpenSource Connections collaborated with the technical teams at OTTO, flagship of Otto Group and one of the most successful e-commerce companies in Europe. OTTO uses the open source Apache Solr search engine to power search across their website www.otto.de . Otto’s search engine deals with over 2.9 million queries per day across 10 million products and helps drive a revenue by GMV of 6.9 billion Euros.
A specific focus of this project was query pre-processing using the open source Querqy tool, created by OSC’s Director of E-commerce Search, René Kriegler. Querqy allows the customer’s query to be rewritten, to add synonyms, boost or bury certain keywords or even delete them entirely, so more relevant results can be provided for particular queries.
OSC assisted OTTO with the integration of this tool and helped refactor large parts of the query processing pipeline, while also consulting on other areas including machine learning, search team structure and scaling the search infrastructure. The OTTO team writes:
Over the last few months, thanks to your help, we’ve made great progress towards a new level of findability on otto.de. We have overhauled our search architecture and freed Solr from a lot of historical legacy. As a result, we can now finally focus more on customer-impacting improvements.
From our point of view, our joint project is a great success. As planned, we got many new ideas and impulses and were able to learn from your expertise. This helps us a lot for the further journey in findability.
We would like to thank you very much for the good cooperation!
Heads of Domain Findability, OTTO
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