ROSE: Robust Caches for Amazon Product Search

Chen Luo, Vihan Lakshman, Anshumali Shrivastava, Tianyu Cao, Sreyashi Nag, Rahul Goutam, Hanqing Lu, Yiwei Song, Bing Yin

Abstract: Product search engines like Amazon Search often use caches to improve the customer user experience; caches can improve both the system’s latency as well as search quality. However, as search traffic increases over time, the cache’s ever-growing size can diminish the overall system performance. Furthermore, typos, misspellings, and redundancy widely witnessed in real-world product search queries can cause unnecessary cache misses, reducing the cache’s utility. In this paper, we introduce ROSE, a RObuSt cachE, a system that is tolerant to misspellings and typos while retaining the look-up cost of traditional caches. The core component of ROSE is a randomized hashing schema that makes ROSE able to index and retrieve an arbitrarily large set of queries with constant memory and constant time. ROSE is also robust to any query intent, typos, and grammatical errors with theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROSE. ROSE is deployed in the Amazon Search Engine and produced a significant improvement over the existing solutions across several key business metrics.