by Angela Guess

A recent release out of the company reports, “Etsy, Inc., which operates marketplaces where people around the world connect, both online and offline, to make, sell and buy unique goods, today announced that it has acquired Blackbird Technologies, Inc. Privately-held, Blackbird has developed proprietary machine learning technology that delivers superior search relevance and recommendations. Blackbird’s novel technology combines images and text using advanced Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence techniques to power a range of search capabilities, including personalized search, ranking, spelling correction and predictive typeahead, to deliver a personalized shopping experience.”

Chad Dickerson, Etsy, Inc. CEO and Chair, noted, “Buyers come to Etsy.com for items they can’t find anywhere else and our goal is to help them discover exactly what they want among our 40 million unique listings. Leveraging Blackbird’s technology, we believe we can enhance the buyer experience by making search quicker and easier and by surfacing even more relevant, tailored product recommendations… Our team has already made substantial enhancements to the search & discovery process on Etsy, especially through features like Exploratory Search, and we are excited for Blackbird’s world-class team and technology to accelerate our progress in this key area.”

The release adds, “Blackbird has advanced technology with a proven track record of delivering high-quality search, including: Machine learning that analyzes user behavior, unstructured data, and other variables to suggest relevant and personalized search recommendations; Natural language processing to understand complex search queries; Deep Learning-based image recognition techniques to index and catalogue photos, which help provide more relevant search results; and Spelling correction and predictive typeahead to make searching faster and more intuitive.”

Read more at PR Newswire.

Photo credit: Etsy