# What I learned building a 12-language AI product search for AliExpress

> Source: <https://dev.to/ohadfarkash/what-i-learned-building-a-12-language-ai-product-search-for-aliexpress-2n61>
> Published: 2026-09-20 11:16:33+00:00

AliExpress has one of the largest product catalogs on the planet, but its search

assumes you already know the exact English keyword. If a shopper can only *describe* what they

want — "that little stone thing for face massage" — the results collapse into noise. I spent a

while building [OneFindMe](https://onefindme.com/en/), a free multilingual search layer that sits in front of AliExpress,

and these were the lessons that actually moved the needle.

Naive translation is a trap. "לק ג'ל" (Hebrew) machine-translates to "gel polish", which on

AliExpress surfaces floor lacquer as often as nail products. The fix was to resolve the shopping

*intent* to a canonical product query first, then translate that — not translate the raw phrase.

A small curated keyword map beat the general model for the high-traffic terms, because the model

kept inventing plausible-but-wrong category ids.

Long, descriptive queries rank worse than short ones on the marketplace API. The product noun has

to lead. "comfortable running shoes for wide feet women" performs far worse than "wide running

shoes". So the pipeline trims to the product noun + one or two qualifiers before it ever hits the

API.

The cheapest listing is almost never the best answer. Sorting candidates by real order volume,

then lightly penalising listings with no reviews, produced results people actually clicked. Price

is a filter, not a ranking signal.

Product availability changes hourly, but the translation of "wireless earbuds" into a good query

does not. Caching the *query resolution* (and letting unknown terms cache their translation on

first use, so the second shopper gets an instant answer) cut latency dramatically without serving

stale stock.

The same query needs different handling per country: shipping thresholds, which categories pay,

even modesty defaults in some regions where the marketplace's own "relevance" surfaces things a

shopper did not ask for. Filtering the junk while never filtering a legitimate intent turned out

to be the hardest, most locale-specific part.

If you want to see the result, [OneFindMe](https://onefindme.com/en/) is live and free — type what you want in any of 12

languages and it does the translating, trimming, and ranking described above. Happy to answer

questions about any of these in the comments.