As computing use grows, so does its environmental footprint. While hardware and software have become significantly more efficient, AI demand is growing even faster, outpacing those efficiency gains and increasing the overall environmental impact of computing. What’s more, measurement standards are still playing catch up, making it difficult for companies to measure and reduce their environmental impact. We’ve grappled with this challenge for years (starting with cloud computing and now AI), and we know we’re not alone. Environmental impact has been growing exponentially as computational power…
As computing use grows, so does its environmental footprint. While hardware and software have become significantly more efficient, AI demand is growing even faster, outpacing those efficiency gains and increasing the overall environmental impact of computing. What’s more, measurement standards are still playing catch up, making it difficult for companies to measure and reduce their environmental impact. We’ve grappled with this challenge for years (starting with cloud computing and now AI), and we know we’re not alone. Environmental impact has been growing exponentially as computational power…
Etsy is home to over 100 million listings from 5.6 million active sellers. Because the items for sale are unique and creative, there is no standard product catalog that tells us what they are. When someone searches for “light linen dress for summer,” our models must infer what the shopper means and what the listings contain. They do that using data from user visits and Etsy listings. We use Kafka for streaming data. These data streams provide fresh features and embeddings that power our machine learning models. If a shopper favorites a hand-painted ceramic mug, that action can shape their…
Etsy is home to over 100 million listings from 5.6 million active sellers. Because the items for sale are unique and creative, there is no standard product catalog that tells us what they are. When someone searches for “light linen dress for summer,” our models must infer what the shopper means and what the listings contain. They do that using data from user visits and Etsy listings. We use Kafka for streaming data. These data streams provide fresh features and embeddings that power our machine learning models. If a shopper favorites a hand-painted ceramic mug, that action can shape their…
Etsy’s marketplace is defined by the creativity and craftsmanship of our sellers and the hundreds of millions of highly diverse products they offer. You can find silversmiths who cold-forge recycled sterling silver, weavers who dye raw fleece with indigo and black walnut, and ceramicists who throw stoneware on a kick wheel. These details define each product and often determine whether it matches a buyer’s taste, style, and interests. Sometimes buyers know exactly what they want, searching for “hand-thrown ceramic mug” or “vegetable-tanned leather wallet.” Other times, especially in…
Etsy’s marketplace is defined by the creativity and craftsmanship of our sellers and the hundreds of millions of highly diverse products they offer. You can find silversmiths who cold-forge recycled sterling silver, weavers who dye raw fleece with indigo and black walnut, and ceramicists who throw stoneware on a kick wheel. These details define each product and often determine whether it matches a buyer’s taste, style, and interests. Sometimes buyers know exactly what they want, searching for “hand-thrown ceramic mug” or “vegetable-tanned leather wallet.” Other times, especially in…
When buyers search on Etsy, they need to quickly and easily find the perfect item. At the same time, sellers need to be confident their unique products are being seen by the right customers. Our Ads Search ranking model, which is built on a multitask learning foundation, is the critical link in this connection. Recently, we identified an opportunity to drive more meaningful buyer engagement by enhancing our model’s ability to predict purchase intent. We achieved this via a dual-pronged improvement: introducing Multigate Mixture of Experts (MMoE) to our model architecture and leveraging…
When buyers search on Etsy, they need to quickly and easily find the perfect item. At the same time, sellers need to be confident their unique products are being seen by the right customers. Our Ads Search ranking model, which is built on a multitask learning foundation, is the critical link in this connection. Recently, we identified an opportunity to drive more meaningful buyer engagement by enhancing our model’s ability to predict purchase intent. We achieved this via a dual-pronged improvement: introducing Multigate Mixture of Experts (MMoE) to our model architecture and leveraging…
Etsy has maintained a sharded MySQL architecture since around 2010. This database cluster contains most of Etsy’s online data and is made up of ~1,000 tables distributed across ~1,000 shards. Over the last 16 years, it has grown significantly: combined, these tables have over 425 TB of data and receive roughly 1.7 million requests per second. Etsy engineers access our MySQL data through a proprietary object-relational mapping (ORM). The ORM has a corresponding model for each MySQL table. When a table is sharded, its rows are partitioned among different databases known as shards. Each shard…
Etsy has maintained a sharded MySQL architecture since around 2010. This database cluster contains most of Etsy’s online data and is made up of ~1,000 tables distributed across ~1,000 shards. Over the last 16 years, it has grown significantly: combined, these tables have over 425 TB of data and receive roughly 1.7 million requests per second. Etsy engineers access our MySQL data through a proprietary object-relational mapping (ORM). The ORM has a corresponding model for each MySQL table. When a table is sharded, its rows are partitioned among different databases known as shards. Each shard…
Ever searched for something specific, only to be met with results that are close, but not quite? On Etsy’s Search Relevance team, that frustration is exactly what we are tackling. Our goal is simple yet ambitious: to help buyers find exactly what they’re looking for, and to help sellers reach the people seeking their special products. Search plays a central role in that mission. Historically, Etsy’s search models have relied heavily on engagement signals – such as clicks, add-to-carts, and purchases – as proxies for relevance. These signals are objective, but they can also be biased: popular…
Ever searched for something specific, only to be met with results that are close, but not quite? On Etsy’s Search Relevance team, that frustration is exactly what we are tackling. Our goal is simple yet ambitious: to help buyers find exactly what they’re looking for, and to help sellers reach the people seeking their special products. Search plays a central role in that mission. Historically, Etsy’s search models have relied heavily on engagement signals – such as clicks, add-to-carts, and purchases – as proxies for relevance. These signals are objective, but they can also be biased: popular…
In 2021, we published a blog post titled “Increasing experimentation accuracy and speed by using control variates,” describing how we reduce the variance of metrics using CUPED in our experimentation platform. This is a follow-up on how CUPED has evolved at Etsy since then. Spoiler – It’s changed a lot, decreasing our average experiment duration by 3 days! Etsy’s mission is to Keep Commerce Human. To achieve this, we need to understand the impact each change to our platform has on our buyers' and sellers' experience. Whether that involves changing the color of the “Buy Now” button on the Etsy…
In 2021, we published a blog post titled “Increasing experimentation accuracy and speed by using control variates,” describing how we reduce the variance of metrics using CUPED in our experimentation platform. This is a follow-up on how CUPED has evolved at Etsy since then. Spoiler – It’s changed a lot, decreasing our average experiment duration by 3 days! Etsy’s mission is to Keep Commerce Human. To achieve this, we need to understand the impact each change to our platform has on our buyers' and sellers' experience. Whether that involves changing the color of the “Buy Now” button on the Etsy…
Rarely are there opportunities for big, bold, game-changing improvements in web performance. The Speculation Rules API (SRA) is a recent browser development that offers just such an opportunity. This post details a joint effort between the search and the web performance teams at Etsy to implement SRA on Etsy search pages and drastically improve the performance of product listing pages with some metrics seeing 20-24% improvements and some dropping all the way to 0ms values. Prefetching Options There are two main ways to predictively fetch resources for the next page: allows us to instruct the…
Rarely are there opportunities for big, bold, game-changing improvements in web performance. The Speculation Rules API (SRA) is a recent browser development that offers just such an opportunity. This post details a joint effort between the search and the web performance teams at Etsy to implement SRA on Etsy search pages and drastically improve the performance of product listing pages with some metrics seeing 20-24% improvements and some dropping all the way to 0ms values. Prefetching Options There are two main ways to predictively fetch resources for the next page: allows us to instruct the…
For more than 20 years, Etsy has been the destination for human creativity online. Our marketplace is home to more than 100 million special items made, handpicked and designed by more than 5 million sellers. These items and the real people behind them are what set us apart. But while the huge variety of Etsy’s inventory is one of our greatest strengths, it also creates fundamental engineering challenges specific to our marketplace. The challenge: Etsy’s unique inventory With millions of creative items across thousands of categories – many of which are unique – it’s difficult to accurately…
For more than 20 years, Etsy has been the destination for human creativity online. Our marketplace is home to more than 100 million special items made, handpicked and designed by more than 5 million sellers. These items and the real people behind them are what set us apart. But while the huge variety of Etsy’s inventory is one of our greatest strengths, it also creates fundamental engineering challenges specific to our marketplace. The challenge: Etsy’s unique inventory With millions of creative items across thousands of categories – many of which are unique – it’s difficult to accurately…
Imagine you have a fabulous idea to drive more sales on Etsy by giving out free ice cream with every purchase. How would you know if it will actually work? One way to test this out is to run an experiment! An experiment is a learning tool that can help us see if a new change really affects user behavior and key metrics we care about. At Etsy, we run nearly 2000 experiments a year for testing new ideas to improve the user experience for our buyers and sellers. For our ice cream idea, we could set up our experiment as an A/B test on the listing page, where one group of users (the “control”…
Imagine you have a fabulous idea to drive more sales on Etsy by giving out free ice cream with every purchase. How would you know if it will actually work? One way to test this out is to run an experiment! An experiment is a learning tool that can help us see if a new change really affects user behavior and key metrics we care about. At Etsy, we run nearly 2000 experiments a year for testing new ideas to improve the user experience for our buyers and sellers. For our ice cream idea, we could set up our experiment as an A/B test on the listing page, where one group of users (the “control”…
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