WalmartLabs, which was formally Kosmix a technology start-up acquired by Walmart, built the search engine. Search was Kosmix's core strength, and WalmartLabs' founders, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, got their start building Junglee, a search engine product bought by Amazon.
Sri Subramaniam, VP at WalmartLabs, was a chief of engineering at Kosmix when it was bought by Walmart. Before that, he spent four years as the director of search product development at eBay, and like several members of the WalmartLabs team, has serious experience with product search.
Walmart's website sees about 45 million unique visitors a month, according to comScore. “We want it to be more of a shopping guide,” Subramaniam says. “We encourage [customers] to explore in a more visual manner”.
One way Polaris' experience is different than a traditional (i.e. Google) search is that the search experience is treats search terms as categories. So, a search for “garden furniture” may not return results with the word “garden” in it, but would return suggestions for "hardy" and "rainproof".
WalmartLabs is continually refining its search results. For example, after two weeks of watching customers type “House” into the search box and tracking the results they clicked on, Polaris determined most of them were looking for the TV show starring Hugh Laurie. People looking for “flats” were really looking for "shoes".Also, Polaris is influenced by the popularity of product on social media. How many “Likes” a product has on Facebook, for example is part of what determines what spot the product shows up in a search result.
