Retail is increasingly moving online. There are only

a few big e-tailers but there is a long tail of small-sized e-tailers.

The big e-tailers are able to collect significant data on user

activities at their websites. They use these assets to derive insights

about their products and to provide superior experiences for their

users. On the other hand, small e-tailers do not possess such user

data and hence cannot match the rich user experiences offered by

big e-tailers. Our key insight is that web search engines possess

significant data on user behaviors that can be used to help smaller

e-tailers mine the same signals that big e-tailers derive from their

proprietary user data assets. These signals can be exposed as data

services in the cloud; e-tailers can leverage them to enable similar

user experiences as the big e-tailers. We present three such data

services in the paper: entity synonym data service, query-to-entity

data service and entity tagging data service. The entity synonym

service is an in-production data service that is currently available

while the other two are data services currently in development at

Microsoft. Our experiments on product datasets show (i) these

data services have high quality and (ii) they have significant

impact on user experiences on e-tailer websites. To the best of

our knowledge, this is the first paper to explore the potential of

using search engine data assets for e-tailers.

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In  ICDE Conference

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