query understanding

Real users type 'what about the new policy?' with no context. Retrieving on those four words returns noise. Here is how strong systems disambiguate before they ever hit the retriever.

E-commerce search is where retrieval, ranking, and business goals collide, and it carries a hard exact-match requirement (brand, size, SKU). The signal is query understanding plus hybrid retrieval plus business-aware ranking. Here is the design.

Query understanding is the front end of search that turns a raw query into structured intent. Get it wrong and even a perfect index returns garbage. The signal is the pipeline and how you measure it. Here is the design.