[HN Gopher] eBay's Fast Billion-Scale Vector Similarity Engine
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eBay's Fast Billion-Scale Vector Similarity Engine
Author : jabo
Score : 30 points
Date : 2023-05-05 20:56 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tech.ebayinc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tech.ebayinc.com)
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Nice to see eBay invest further on its search side.
|
| This paper is too dense for me to read through at this moment,
| but eBay must be a real disappointment for its shareholders:
|
| Despite its head start at being a platform for online retail open
| to anyone, eBay stock has only doubled in 10 years, or in other
| words, added $12b in equity value (currently $24b). Imagine that:
| a successful tech company with a real product in a market that's
| going stratospheric (online shopping) has lagged the S&P 500.
|
| Meanwhile Amazon has octupled, which works out to adding $864b in
| market value.
|
| In other words, Amazon has added 36 eBays worth of equity to
| itself in the last 10 years.
|
| Ok, I haven't looked at corp debt to calculate these numbers
| based on enterprise value, but that could make the numbers worse:
| eBay is asset-light with little physical infra compared to
| Amazon.
|
| eBay's fees have gone through the roof, so I suspect its volume
| has been decreasing.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| Amazons growth has been one of the most astonishing things this
| decade. It feels like they broke all rules and managed to
| absolutely dominate. I remember in the 2000s the dominant
| paradigm was to be a platform since software "can't do infra".
| The idea was to be the middleman that Walmart, Target etc use,
| not to directly compete with them. Amazon did the opposite and
| competed hard and won.
|
| Another anecdote is in a sea of tech companies that try to
| attract talent with perks/ benefit/ even high salaries Amazon
| had none. Amazon prides itself for making a table out of a door
| to save money (no joke). But arguably Amazon employees made
| bank in Amazon because of its stock growth, definitely more
| compared to Google, Apple, Meta, maybe similar to Microsoft.
| Finally of all companies, Amazon is the only big tech I know
| that veered off its main product and still dominated. AWS is
| completely off the left field for Amazon, it makes me
| optimistic that Amazon might become a juggernaut in healthcare
| too (they definitely are trying).
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Ebay used to have an engineering limit on the number of items
| in their indexes so they couldn't grow and had to increase fees
| instead to keep the item count down, I don't know if they still
| have that limit, I haven't been paying attention. It meant they
| ended up with a focus on very high margin crap, Amazon is now
| going the same way because they can and it makes a lot of
| money.
|
| Maybe with more listings eBay can lower their fees so that low
| margin items are able to be sold. And maybe with some
| competition between the two there might be a reduction of fees
| and a return to quality. Sadly I don't think eBay is competing
| effectively, their website still sucks and I can't get anything
| resembling an invoice for taxes, maybe it's there but I haven't
| seen it, I don't use eBay very often.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >Ebay used to have an engineering limit on the number of
| items in their indexes so they couldn't grow and had to
| increase fees instead to keep the item count down
|
| I find this incredibly hard to believe. The hard limit on the
| number of total listings was deemed such an intractable
| problem to solve that rather than focus all engineering
| efforts for a few months on raising it, they just threw up
| their hands, didn't even attempt to solve it, and tried to
| increase revenue solely through higher listing fees?
| bliteben wrote:
| I find it very credible. Early ebay had very high fees on
| photos. They also would purge old auctions within at least
| 90 days. They still do purge old auctions which clearly
| would have some seo value. Also the whole way ebay motors
| was operated as essentially a separate site lends
| credibility as well.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| That just means they were trying to cut costs (by
| reducing their storage footprint) and raise revenue (by
| charging a premium for photos) at the same time. I guess
| the brass at eBay deemed the commercial value of
| archiving old listings to be worth less than the cost of
| storing them. Remember, storage used to be very
| expensive, and no amount of engineering effort could
| decrease the cost of server racks and hard drives.
|
| eBay motors is separate because the process of buying a
| car is very different from buying knickknacks. The number
| of listings on eBay motors is tiny compared to the main
| site, so it doesn't even make sense that they'd split it
| off specifically to split up their listing database.
|
| None of what you mention is evidence of a technical
| limitation.
| esafak wrote:
| HNSW seems better in the criteria that matter.
|
| I think similarity search is a commodity now; I would not invest
| in developing an in-house solution given the abundance of good
| commercial solutions.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| They're embeddings so they're dense. There are few things
| easier than dense vector similarity.
| esafak wrote:
| Embeddings for retrieval don't have to be. It is not unheard
| of to transform the raw embeddings to optimize them for
| retrieval; e.g., through binarization or hashing.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I was more making a distinction between embeddings and bag
| of words which are very very sparse matrices. The embedding
| dimensionality will not be anywhere near as high so this
| level of sparsity is a minor inconvenience.
|
| Edit: also CPUs for this, yikes...
| almog wrote:
| One of the best things about eBay compared to other market places
| like Amazon and Aliexpress, is that their search operators
| include not just AND (space) but also OR (comma separated values
| inside parentheses) and NOT (minus) but more importantly - eBay's
| search engine respects the supported operators and denoting which
| items are search results and which are suggested/similar.
|
| This cannot be said about Amazon, Aliexpress, both which
| intentionally (I guess) mix similar items with results that match
| the search query.
|
| I hope that eBay keep those two things distinct.
| Duplo wrote:
| I dislike eBay search, for example all of a sudden one of my
| daily bookmarked searches went from the usual 10 results to
| THOUSANDS, all of them not including my search term, this is
| the link:
| https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=Tasmota&LH_PrefLoc=1&...
|
| Why are some sellers having all their listings (car parts)
| included in my search for "Tasmota"?
| almog wrote:
| That's interesting, I've seen it happening randomly that a
| search query would return unrelated results for 1 out of 100
| queries using the same query.
|
| In your example however, it seems to me that if you add
| quotes, the irrelevant results are gone:
| https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=%22Tasmota%22
| Scoundreller wrote:
| _And_ you can setup email alerts for those complex search
| terms.
|
| I made a tiny amount of money doing typo arbitrage on bundles
| labelled as "Nitendo" many years ago.
|
| Sometimes when I wanted a really niche item, I'd wait for one
| of those alert emails that had more than usual results because
| I knew the bidding would be split.
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