Venky Harinarayan

Walmart is deploying a new internally-built search engine to power Walmart.com and ultimately increase sales conversions from searches. The Polaris search engine, developed by @WalmartLabs, has been in use for the last few months onWalmart.com and has already boosted conversions to sales by 10-15 percent, the company said. Polaris grew out of the semantic technology brought over through Walmart's acquisition last year of Kosmix, including Kosmix's social genome project, which connects people to places, events and products. While Kosmix founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who led the newly established @WalmartLabs, have moved on, Walmart is making good use of their technology.