Deft is a company that wants to be Google for e-commerce products around the world and let you search for exactly what you need rather than being lost in the whole lot of other products that people are trying to sell. Deft, founded back in 2019, is “relying on different techniques, including building its own parser and knowledge graph combined with large language models (LLMs) and multimodal search”.
As the report mentions, “Users can go to Deft and search for things like “wooden lamps with three legs under $400” or upload an image, and modify their search to “lamps under $400 that look like this.” While it’s hard to know you can do this if someone doesn’t tell you that it works, users can also paste the image directly into the search bar. The company is working on highlighting the image search feature better”. It is also added by the company that “it doesn’t just look at the listing and description for search results. It also looks at materials, reviews, photos and more. This way, when someone searches for a “pet-friendly” couch, Deft can return results with stain and scratch-resistant material”.
In a statement, it is said that “Deft is currently focusing on furniture and home décor search but aims to expand to different categories along the way. The company has built its own scraping tech to add products to its search results. It shows results from Target, Pottery Barn and other places on the web. The company hasn’t added searches from Amazon yet because it feels there are a lot of “junk” listings on the site and it will take some work to clean up that data”. Zach Hudson accuses companies like Google and Amazon for focusing too much on ads and says that “You have companies like Google and Amazon that continue to push the most relevant listings down so they can make more advertising dollars. Some easy searches are now hard because marketers have learned how to game these search engines. Plus, now you have AI content that is putting the burden on users to separate fact from fiction,”
