How I Added AI Image Search to a Marketplace Bot (And Why It Changed Everything)

My users were frustrated. Not in a "this feature doesn't work" way — in a "I literally don't know what words to use" way. A buyer would join the marketplace bot, open the search, and just... stare. They knew exactly what they wanted. They'd seen it at a friend's place, or spotted it in a photo. But they couldn't find the right keywords. "Decorative thing"? "Round wooden thingy"? Every search returned garbage, or nothing. That's the moment I decided to build image search. And it turned out to be one of the best decisions I made for the project. The Problem With Text Search in Marketplaces Text search is great when users know the vocabulary. But in a secondhand or small-seller marketplace, that's rarely the case. Sellers list things the way they think about them. Buyers search the way they think about them. Those two vocabularies almost never match perfectly. A seller lists "mid-century credenza." A buyer searches "brown dresser with legs." Even with fuzzy matching and morphological anal