Recording: The Evolution of Search at Meetup

By Eileen Gilbertson

The Community Update features the latest news about Meetup exclusively from the Meetup team. This month, Meetup’s Director of Data and Machine Learning, Sach Sokol, will be touching on Meetup’s updated search engine infrastructure, using search result data to improve search relevance, and improving search for non-English languages.

Main Takeaway:

• At Meetup, we want to help users find events and groups that interest them as quickly as possible. Search is a huge part of this. 
  • About 10% of users use current search. Our users learn over time that the search doesn’t serve their needs. 
• We completely rebuilt the search infrastructure and have been testing in partial rollouts and A/B testing. 
  • The initial improvements were really geared toward English users. After further testing, we found that the 4 top used languages also saw a significant lift in RSVPs.
    Other languages also saw improvements, but we haven’t been able to call them significant because of the low number of users. 
• Upcoming Search Improvements:
  • Group Search infrastructure and search relevance
  • UI improvements
  • Better filtering (search radius, date/time, and online/IRL events)

Top Q&A Questions/Resource:

• What can we do to make our groups more noticeable?
  • As an organizer, I think the clearest advice I can give is to make sure that your title is clear and that it has some of the words that describe what is happening at the event. Make sure there are clear descriptions in the event and group. 
• Are you going to add more filters to search?
  • We’re working on that today. In some ways this does exist in the old experience, but not as cohesively as we’d like to. Like better being able to define the geographic radius, being able to refine when you want to see events, and being able to find online or in person events.
• How have you adapted search results for COVID-19?
  • Meetup has done a lot to enhance our online event capabilities. This is something our users have found to be extremely useful.
    In the search results today, we do not discriminate between online and in person events. We are adding a filter so that you can sort as a user. You will also see events somewhat outside of your geography if it is online. 
• We’re hiring!
  • Data & Personalization Product Manager
  • Senior Machine Learning Engineer 
  • Reach out to recruiting@meetup.com if you’re interested in applying

Meetup Team

Last modified on June 23, 2021