Personalized Query Suggestions

With the exponential growth of information on the internet, users have been relying on search engines for finding the precise documents. However, user queries are often short. The inherent ambiguity of short queries imposes great challenges for search engines to understand user intent. Query suggestion is one key technique for search engines to augment user queries so that they can better understand user intent. In the past, query suggestions have been relying on either term-frequency--based methods with little semantic understanding of the query, or word-embedding--based methods with little personalization efforts. Here, we present a sequence-to-sequence-model--based query suggestion framework that is capable of modeling structured, personalized features and unstructured query texts naturally. This capability opens up the opportunity to better understand query semantics and user intent at the same time. As the largest professional network, LinkedIn has the advantage of utilizing a rich amount of accurate member profile information to personalize query suggestions. We applied this framework in the LinkedIn production traffic and showed that personalized query suggestions significantly improved member search experience as measured by key business metrics at LinkedIn.