I built an AI-powered search engine for a fashion and homeware store
I built Meepo – a smarter search engine for a local (South African) fashion and homeware store. I have no affiliation with said store. I built this for myself, because I was frustrated at how difficult it was to find what I wanted with the existing search engine + I was curious how well CLIP (a relatively new AI technique with open source code and models) would work here. I think it works quite well! It's much more forgiving than the original search engine. I don't have to guess what exactly they decided to label a particular item. But what I like even more is that it works quite well for…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
I built Meepo – a smarter search engine for a local (South African) fashion and homeware store. I have no affiliation with said store. I built this for myself, because I was frustrated at how difficult it was to find what I wanted with the existing search engine + I was curious how well CLIP (a relatively new AI technique with open source code and models) would work here. I think it works quite well! It's much more forgiving than the original search engine. I don't have to guess what exactly they decided to label a particular item. But what I like even more is that it works quite well for abstract things like "colourful shoes". Here's the full stack: - Hardware: Deployed on a 2CPU 4GB RAM VPS w/ docker - Storage: SQLite + object storage (for images) - Search: CLIP text/image neural networks + faiss similarity search index - Pipeline: Python scripts + cron - Web: Django serving HTML/Tailwind/daisyUI - IDE: Developed in notebooks w/ nbdev (I'm trying to develop all of my software in Jupyter notebooks - a separate discussion) I tried to keep the implementation as simple as possible and I'm happy with the result! It took ~2 weeks to build and has been running seamlessly without my input for a few weeks now. I'm more familiar with ML than web so very happy with that timeline.
Does the same job
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