Search Engines Get a Machine Language Boost

Online retailer eBay is attempting to extend its machine language capabilities beyond automatic language translation to e-commerce uses designed to make product searches more relevant. As automation improves, the company said one goal eliminating the search box. Meanwhile, development cycles have been reduced as more machine learning libraries are released to the open source community. "As machines get better at decoding natural language, commerce should become increasingly conversational -- eventually rendering the search box redundant," eBay CEO Devin Wenig noted recently. Wenig added that the pace of machine intelligence development has quickened over the last year.