Refining Amazon’s Search Engine | Dwayne Bowman and Ruben Ortega

Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Dwayne Bowman and Ruben Ortega. They discuss the birth of Bowtega Box, maintaining the balance between adding new features and continuous upscaling and customer support, and redesigning and refining Amazon's Search functionality.

Ruben is the former director of Amazon's Mechanical Turk and CTO of A9.com (Amazon’s innovative search subsidiary), and was responsible for its early scaling and technical success. He also participated in designing infrastructure that could dynamically scale from hundreds to thousands of transactions per second. Dwayne, a former software engineer at Apple, was Amazon’s former Director of Engineering and took part in redesigning Amazon's Search engine.

Episode Resources:

• Dwayne Bowman’s LinkedIn
• Visit Woodlawn School
• Ruben Ortega’s LinkedIn
• Check out Tonal
• Help support devcolor.org and NDRC
• Subscribe to our Newsletter
• Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:40 How Amazon’s Bowtega Box came to be
• 06:52 Making it easier for customers to navigate such as browse tree for relevant searches
• 08:13 Why was the alphabetical algorithm the only option in 1996-1997?
• 09:47 Sales jumped significantly when Bowtega Box was launched
• 11:21 Fixing Amazon’s Search feature for better user experience
• 15:23 Building a catalog for a new book consumed a lot of time
• 17:53 Balancing new features versus scaling and support
• 19:08 Preventing downtime while Search updates are ongoing
• 22:03 Hire people who take the problem and solve it
• 24:08 Without A/B Testing, take the right signal for the next step
• 25:45 Where did the Bowtega name originate?
• 26:44 What was Amazon like in 1997 - 1998?
• 28:10 The Bar Raiser team
• 30:48 Amazon’s Search team set the bar for hiring engineers
• 32:06 How did the product mix change search complexity?
• 34:22 Amazon’s first word-based ad product
• 36:18 Expanding the accessibility of Search in e-commerce