Scaling up Machine Learning in Instacart Search for the 2020 Surge in Online Shopping

Global grocery industry is worth a massive $5.7T of which only 10% is currently online. As online grocery business accelerated from 2020, Instacart search, which supports one of the largest catalogs of grocery items in the world, started facing new challenges. This talk focuses on these unique challenges and how we improved the performance of our machine learning models to significantly improve search relevance and our business metrics as a result.