Dynamic facet ordering for faceted product search engines

Faceted browsing is widely used in Web shops and product comparison sites. In these cases, a fixed ordered list of facets is often employed. This approach suffers from two main issues. First, one needs to invest a significant amount of time to devise an effective list. Second, with a fixed list of facets it can happen that a facet becomes useless if all products that match the query are associated to that particular facet. In this work, we present a framework for dynamic facet ordering in e-commerce. Based on measures for specificity and dispersion of facet values, the fully automated algorithm ranks those properties and facets on top that lead to a quick drill-down for any possible target product. In contrast to existing solutions, the framework addresses e-commerce specific aspects, such as the possibility of multiple clicks, the grouping of facets by their corresponding properties, and the abundance of numeric facets. In a large-scale simulation and user study, our approach was, in general, favorably compared to a facet list created by domain experts, a greedy approach as baseline, and a state-of-the-art entropy-based solution. facets. To address these two problems we propose a novel algorithm for dynamic ordering of the product facets based on the query results. This algorithm relies on measures such as specificity and dispersion for qualitative and quantitative facets, respectively, to rank the properties associated with these facets so that users are able to find the products of interest with a minimum number of drill-down steps. Using a large-scale simulation study and a user-based evaluation, we show that our algorithm outperforms the expert-based fixed facets approach, a greedy baseline, and a state-of-The-Art entropy-based solution. This paper is an extended abstract of our previous work [1].

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