Field Evidence & Live Semantic Reference Engine
Two anonymized US furniture retailer search audits (October 31, 2026, 46 real shopper requests verified against catalog truth) plus our live Talos Semantic Engine showcase on usafurnish.com.
Live Reference Implementation · usafurnish.com
Talos Semantic Engine (Reference Store: usafurnish.com)
We don’t just audit broken search—we built and run a production multi-store semantic search engine across 10,000+ multi-store furniture SKUs at usafurnish.com (<120ms p95 hybrid retrieval + reranking). Below is how our hybrid constraint parser and cross-encoder reranker resolve the exact queries that broke Retailer A and Retailer B:
| Shopper Request | Retailer A / B Lexical Result | Talos Constraint Parser | Talos Hybrid Engine Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| tv stand for 75 inch tv | 0 results (or unrelated popular-products fallback grid) | Category: Media Stand · Width ≥ 67" · In Stock | 10 matching solid-wood & oak media consoles (68"–84" W) ranked by TV-fit margin |
| couch that is good for kids and dogs | Dining chairs & counter stools matching the token "kids" | Category: Sofa / Couch · Fabric: Pet-Friendly / Stain-Resistant Performance | 72 performance-fabric & rub-tested sofas ranked by family durability |
| apartment size sofa under 80 inches that isn’t leather | 88" and 94" leather sectionals (ignores "< 80" and negation "isn’t") | Category: Sofa · Width ≤ 80" · Material ≠ Leather | 14 fabric & bouclé apartment sofas (68"–79" W) with zero leather leakage |
Case 1 · Anonymized On-Site Search Audit
Furniture retailer A: 10 of 22 requests failed
- Store
- US furniture retailer with showrooms, Shopify, about 1,600 products
- Search engine
- Fast Simon
- Tested
- October 31, 2026, 22 real shopper requests, top results checked against the catalog
9 of the 10 failures returned zero results.
Root causes
- Widths and TV fit sit in page text, not attributes search can filter on
- Use facts (pet-friendly, kid-friendly) only in descriptions
- Price limits ignored (“walnut desk under $500” showed a sectional near $5,000)
- Conversational words (“looking for”, “small”) cause zero results instead of being parsed
Shopify’s free built-in search, run on the same catalog, found a pet-friendly sofa this engine missed, but it still ignored measurements.
Example & Talos Resolution
tv stand for 75 inch tv
Shown on store: “No results found”, then a dining table, a sectional and a storage bed.
In stock: 10 media stands 67 inches or wider were in stock.
Talos Semantic Engine: Talos extracts width (≥ 67") and category (Media Console) from prose, returning 10 fitting in-stock TV stands in <90ms.
Case 2 · Anonymized On-Site Search Audit
Furniture retailer B: 7 of 24 requests failed
- Store
- US furniture retailer, hosted search engine, about 1,200 products
- Search engine
- Algolia
- Tested
- October 31, 2026, 24 real shopper requests, top results checked against the catalog
Root causes
- The engine never says “no results”, so a failure looks like a confident page of the wrong products
- A pet-friendly fabric filter exists, but “kids and dogs” is not mapped to it
- Seating capacity and shape are on product pages but not used for ranking
- Requests for products the store does not stock get unrelated products instead of the honest nearest match
Nine more requests were only partly right: fitting products appeared, but below position 3, or the results ignored one constraint.
Example & Talos Resolution
couch that is good for kids and dogs
Shown on store: A dining chair, a counter stool and two dining sets.
In stock: 72 sofas carry the store’s pet-friendly fabric tag.
Talos Semantic Engine: Talos maps natural-language use-case ("kids and dogs") to the structured pet-friendly / performance fabric facet and filters to Category = Sofa (72 matches).
Design-Partner Case Study Program ($2,500)
We offer a $2,500 design-partner rate on our first 3 Tier 1 Search Findability Audits (normally $3,500) in exchange for permission to publish a named before-and-after case study once your Tier 2 fix is re-tested. Apply for a Design-Partner Audit →