Search in Native language on Finnish online shops?

nv_oza · Post by **nv_oza** » Fri Jul 26, 2013 11:34 am

I am part of a Helsinki-based start up that works on natural language search. I have been thinking about one idea and would appreciate if the forum could help validate my thoughts.
Here is the pitch:

As a resident in Finland, all non-finnish persons do some sort of online shopping or surfing on gigantti.fi, verkkokauppa, anttila and so on. One thing I noticed is all Finnish online shops have search box that only works against Finnish keywords. Will it be of help, if a search box allows one to enter a term in English or Russian or Chinese or other languages and brings the relevant products in the results? An example, on gigantti.fi, a shopper can write 'dell laptop' and still gets results from gigantti.fi, it will bring back dell tietokone.

The results will not be translated but then it would also help to develop vocabulary

. Like search for washing machine and it would be pesukonet back.

Thoughts? Comments? Ideas? Would this be of value to shoppers?

Thanks in advance for support and contributing the discussion!

Nilay Oza
Klevu Oy

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Adrian42 · Post by **Adrian42** » Fri Jul 26, 2013 11:56 am

nv_oza wrote:As a resident in Finland, all non-finnish persons do some sort of online shopping or surfing on gigantti.fi, verkkokauppa, anttila and so on. One thing I noticed is all Finnish online shops have search box that only works against Finnish keywords. Will it be of help, if a search box allows one to enter a term in English or Russian or Chinese or other languages and brings the relevant products in the results? An example, on gigantti.fi, a shopper can write 'dell laptop' and still gets results from gigantti.fi, it will bring back dell tietokone.

Thoughts? Comments? Ideas? Would this be of value to shoppers?

I don't see how this would make sense.

Searching for "dell laptop" is a very stupid way of searching even on an English language website, since it usually brings results different from "dell notebook" - and some laptops might show up in neither of them.
And you also get may laptop bags in the results.

And that becomes worse with translations, since you seem to miss the obvious problem that there is no 1:1 mapping between languages.
E.g. for the English term "RAM" there are three different equally used terms in my native language German ("RAM", "Arbeitsspeicher", "Hauptspeicher"), and different articles in the same shop might use different of these terms.

The normal way of finding items in Finnish webshops is to use the normal navigation of the website with Google translate.

Different from the suboptimal approach with a search term, this usually allows you to e.g. find all Dell laptops with a 17" display.

nv_oza · Post by **nv_oza** » Fri Jul 26, 2013 12:06 pm

Thanks for your comment. We have noticed however from real consumer search data (at least in the UK and US based stores), that they search with a variety of words and granularity (i.e. from highly abstract words to very narrow search).

007 · Post by **007** » Fri Jul 26, 2013 12:47 pm

so far i've been using google translate for 'search terms', by far the best. but the idea of using native language for search terms is bit fuzzy to me as I wouldn't necessarily understand the search results. it's like going to ebay.fi and searching with finnish terms. When the results are shown in english, how would i know the description of the product? hence the google translation........

are you thinking of selling this sort of service to various online shops? it might work as I think bit more about this. usually when a potential customer goes to .fi shops. webpages have wide varieties of listings, would be much better if a 'known term' can be used for search, which would then produce the results. but with limited understanding of details, more importantly comparisons between products for the best buy, the service in question mightn't be the game-changer.

riku2 · Post by **riku2** » Fri Jul 26, 2013 1:21 pm

nv_oza wrote:Will it be of help, if a search box allows one to enter a term in English or Russian or Chinese or other languages and brings the relevant products in the results? An example, on gigantti.fi, a shopper can write 'dell laptop' and still gets results from gigantti.fi, it will bring back dell tietokone.

I don't see this as that useful in the search box since it relies on the retailer entering the english/russian names for the products. all very easy for dishwasher or washing machine but what about more obscure items? what is the finnish for soundbar? or 16 port router? some finnish retailers don't even translate those product names. also bear in mind that many searches are done by product code so if i'm searching for a yamaha soundbar I might type in yamaha or YAS-101. I don't want the search to fail because the retailer calls it a loudspeaker or audio system or tv accessory. same goes for your example "pesukone". some retailers will call it a puukinpesukone and some just pesukone.

what is more useful from online retailers are their departments/category headings translated, since if you are just browsing for any kind of dishwasher then a foreigner would not know it's under "home machines" in finnish terms (and similarly a toaster is under small appliances). those categories also differ by retailer - some will break down washing machines by the width, others by whether they are front/top loading.

I think a good source of examples are german online retailers. they have a lot of foreign customers and will not translate product names and such,but will have the shipping terms, product categories, major things translated.

nv_oza · Post by **nv_oza** » Fri Jul 26, 2013 1:27 pm

Good point, just one clarification. We do not intend to translate product catalog in any way. It works in the following way: a term entered in English by the shopper is programmatically enhanced and translated into Finnish. The enhanced Finnish version then goes to the Finnish product catalog for keyword search. So, word washing machine will take care of various kinds of terms related to pesukone.

atas · Post by **atas** » Fri Jul 26, 2013 9:56 pm

Out of my personal experience looking for a laptop: used Google Chrome, navigated to the laptop section, problem solved. Where I see value in your idea is not the translation part, but the aggregation of results from several local web sites. Then the translation would get you non-Finnish speaking users on top of that.

Pursuivant · Post by **Pursuivant** » Fri Jul 26, 2013 10:40 pm

It would be much useful if it worked on www.mol.fi

rinso · Post by **rinso** » Sat Jul 27, 2013 8:16 am

It is a technical complicated concept and webshops would not incorporate it in their sites unless it is a big advantage for a large group of customers.
Non Finnish shoppers are only a very small percentage of their sales and Google translate will do fine for them.

There are some (tourist search engines) websites that can present the results in 26 EU languages.
They only translated the menu (countries/area) into the different languages. Then the pages are translated with Google.

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