The gap between a need and a keyword
A shopper knows what they need. A catalog knows what products it contains. The difficult part is getting those two descriptions to meet.
If someone describes an attribute or a use case, a strict keyword match can return nothing even when a useful product is present. That mismatch is the starting point for my semantic search exploration.
Search is an interaction
The goal is not to make the technology visible. It is to help a person express a need, inspect useful results, and decide what to do next.
That means relevance is only one part of the experience. The results also need enough context for someone to understand why a product might fit.
A useful result should make sense to the person asking.
Use questions that people actually ask
A demo can look convincing when its queries are chosen to match the catalog. A useful evaluation has to include different wording, specific attributes, and searches where there really is no good match.
I want to keep the intended outcome concrete: help shoppers discover products and help store owners make their existing catalog easier to navigate.