How Yahoo enhances search retargeting using Amazon Bedrock
Yahoo replaced its legacy Word2Vec + Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) keyword expansion system with a generative AI-powered solution using Amazon Bedrock to improve search retargeting accuracy and reach. Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 was selected as the optimal foundation model for generating semantically relevant keyword expansions, achieving a fivefold improvement in median broad expansion ratio and doubling maximum expansion under strict similarity thresholds. A verification step was intro
Analysis
TL;DR
- Yahoo replaced its legacy Word2Vec + Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) keyword expansion system with a generative AI-powered solution using Amazon Bedrock to improve search retargeting accuracy and reach.
- Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 was selected as the optimal foundation model for generating semantically relevant keyword expansions, achieving a fivefold improvement in median broad expansion ratio and doubling maximum expansion under strict similarity thresholds.
- A verification step was introduced to mitigate LLM hallucinations by converting expanded keywords into embeddings and filtering those below a cosine similarity threshold with the original seed keywords, ensuring semantic fidelity and trustworthiness.
Why It Matters
This case study demonstrates how large language models can be effectively integrated into real-world advertising infrastructure to solve complex semantic matching problems at scale. For AI practitioners and ad-tech engineers, it highlights practical strategies for deploying generative AI in production environments while maintaining control over output quality, relevance, and compliance—critical considerations when handling sensitive user data and advertiser intent signals.
Technical Details
- The legacy system relied on Word2Vec embeddings combined with locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) for keyword expansion, which suffered from outdated vocabulary, phrase-level focus, syntactic bias, and frequent zero-expansion failures.
- The modernized architecture leverages Amazon Bedrock to access multiple foundation models (including Amazon Nova, Meta Llama, and Anthropic’s Claude) without custom infrastructure, enabling rapid experimentation and deployment.
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 was chosen after evaluation via Amazon SageMaker Studio due to its superior balance between expansion breadth and semantic coherence relative to seed keywords.
- A post-generation validation layer converts all LLM-generated keywords into embeddings and computes cosine similarity against the original seed set; terms falling below a predefined threshold are discarded to filter out irrelevant or hallucinated outputs.
- Expanded keywords alongside originals are stored in an Amazon OpenSearch Service cluster for downstream batch scoring workflows that match users’ historical search behavior to advertiser-defined audience segments.
Industry Insight
Adopting managed LLM services like Amazon Bedrock allows enterprises to rapidly prototype and deploy AI-driven features such as dynamic keyword expansion without heavy engineering overhead, accelerating time-to-value for computational advertising use cases. Implementing guardrails—such as embedding-based similarity checks—is essential to maintain reliability and prevent degradation in targeting quality caused by model hallucinations, especially in high-stakes domains where precision directly impacts ROI and brand safety.
Disclaimer: The above content is generated by AI and is for reference only.