• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 1, 2023

Lucidworks has expanded its partnership with Google Cloud Platform to accelerate search and discovery for several of the world’s top brands, including Crate & Barrel. The announcement was made on Thursday.

The partnership combines solutions from Lucidworks and Google Cloud Platform to power precise and personalized search and discovery and give users a more relevant, dynamic, real-time experience that drives better key outcomes for businesses. 

Sanjay Mehta, head of industry, ecommerce at Lucidworks, said that when it comes to ecommerce -- especially machine learning -- brands and companies do not have enough data to support really advanced semantic search, because there are not enough training signals.

“Google brings that training data from platforms like Shopping,” he said. “Bringing it into a system with that capability is key.”

For customers who want to replace a search legacy platform, this partnership can support that change, along with research.

Companies also can expect a rapid time-to-value, better in-the-moment personalization, improved average order value (AOV), margin and sell-through, and improved GMROI (inventory).

The joint partnership also accelerates relevance and user experience in merchandising, customer service, B2B and B2C commerce, call center, conversational AI and chat, and enterprise workplace applications, along with large language models, and Vertex AI/Pathways Language Model (PaLM) API.

Lucidworks Fusion combines with Google’s Vertex AI, Discovery AI, BigQuery, Vision, Dialogue Flow, and Contact Center AI (CCAI) to orchestrate the entire customer journey. Vertical-based solutions include financial services, travel and hospitality, telecommunications, and media.

Mehta said Fusion also allows customers to bring other models, such as speech to text, expanding past product discover to customer service applications, knowledge management and chat.

Crate and Barrel is one example of how Lucidworks works with Google Cloud. When Crate and Barrel turned to Lucidworks its website’s search engine didn’t make discovering products like waffle irons or magnet board easy or intuitive. Shoppers' searches often returned irrelevant results or none at all, even when Crate and Barrel had the exact product they were looking for.

Hosted on Google Cloud, Lucidworks leveraged Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to help manage the Lucidworks search engine through containerized deployments. This allowed Lucidworks to develop, test, and release new features quickly and to isolate its workloads. The accessibility, stability, and strong foundation of security provided by Google Cloud, and to Lucidworks customers by proxy, were all top-of-mind for Crate and Barrel.