With 71% of Americans getting their news recommendations from social platforms, personalized content has quickly become how new media is discovered. Whether people are searching for specific topics or interacting with recommended content, everything users see is optimized by algorithms to improve click-through rates (CTR), engagement, and relevance. Sohu is a NASDAQ-listed Chinese online media, video, search, and gaming group. It leveraged Milvus, an open-source vector database built by Zilliz, to build a semantic vector search engine inside its news app. This article explains how the company used user profiles to fine-tune personalized content recommendations over time, improving user experience and engagement.
Recommending Content Using Semantic Vector Search
Sohu News user profiles are built from browsing history and adjusted as users search for, and interact with, news content. Sohu’s recommender system uses semantic vector search to find relevant news articles. The system works by identifying a set of tags that are expected to be of interest to each user based on browsing history. It then quickly searches for relevant articles and sorts the results by popularity (measured by average CTR), before serving them to users.