What eBay's Machine Learning Advances Can Teach IT Professionals - InformationWeek

For four years, eBay has been collecting customer search data, along with search click-through rates and other customer interaction data, and feeding the information into its machine learning system. In an interview with InformationWeek, Dan Fain, the company's VP of engineering, outlined the steps being taken, and the business motivation behind them. The use-cases are worth exploring for any IT professional looking to help improve a company's bottom line by applying machine learning to customer-facing applications. Search, customer click patterns, language translations, item recommendations, and image analysis are among the key ways machine learning is being put to use at eBay, according to Fain. The first, and most important, application of machine learning is to improve search functions on eBay.com, according to Fain. "We have several machine learning models working behind the scenes to ensure we get the best search results," said Fain in our interview.