Building Trending Search at Zomato
What, why and how of building Trending Search at Zomato.
What is Trending Search?
Trending searches is a search suggestion feature that appears when a user taps the search bar on Zomato App or Web. These suggestions differ based on user’s location preference. Here’s how it looks:
Why Trending Search?
- Ease of decision making: Deciding what to eat is a hard decision! Amongst choices — chicken dumplings, kathi rolls, sushi — what to really choose? We want to help users decide faster by showcasing popular options around them. In turn, reducing anxiety and shaping intent.
- Less typing, more eating: We want to read our users’ mind and preempt what they may search. Less typing and lesser spelling mistakes → faster and accurate food discovery. Trust us, nobody knows the ‘HANGRY 😠‘ feeling better than us!
- Improved discovery: One of the biggest strength of Zomato is helping users discover new places, cuisines and dishes. We want to leverage our consumer base and showcase the wisdom of the crowd to improve discovery.
Things we considered:
- 15 days of search data: Given transient nature of food industry, we decided to consider only past 15 days of search (pure intent) data to build the Trending Search.
- This day last week: Weekends are different from weekday — people search different things on different days. As expected, people search more about bars, pubs, nightlife (🍺🍺🍺), brunch etc over weekends. Weekdays we usually see spikes in fine-dining, cafe and food related searches. Hence, we developed a scale that takes into consideration ‘This day last week’.
- Relevance and personalization: To boost discover, we emphasized on uniqueness and personalization while maintaining relevance. In addition, we included an element of surprise which meant that on each refresh user will find something new (but relevant) in Trending Search.
User response
Over the first 6 weeks, ~7% of our users interacted with Trending Search on daily basis.
This led to an improved discovery for users and saved a few million users the hassle of typing. We continue to maintain CTR (click-through rate) originating from Trending Search.
Trending Search v2.0
For v2.0, we will introduce time of day and other external factors such as weather, events and festivals. This will ensure that the user easily orders their favorite chai-pakoda on a rainy day!
Do leave your feedback and suggestions in comments.
Team: Paras Arora, Nikunj Jain, Yasoob Haider, Devanshi
