Engineering
Search that finally understands Banglish
Why 'kalো t-shirt size L' beats most BD search engines — and what we did about it.
By Search & AI · 30 May 2022 · 6 min read
Bangladeshi shoppers mix scripts mid-query — 'kalo' (Banglish) for black, 'লাল' (Bangla) for red, 'XL' (English) for size. Most search engines tokenize one script and discard the others.
Our search stack normalizes across Bangla, Banglish, and English at the query layer, with bidirectional synonym maps for colour, size, brand, and category terms.
Click-through-rate on multi-script queries went from 11% to 38% post-launch.