Personalizing Incremental Video Search with Hybrid Text and ID Embeddings

Incremental video search requires high-quality ranking after each keystroke, where intent is often underspecified (e.g., 1-3 character prefixes). We present a personalization system for Apple TV search that combines complementary semantic and collaborative signals at ranking time. Our approach learns two item embedding spaces: (i) a text-based multilingual encoder (TextEmb) fine-tuned on co-engagement triplets via contrastive learning, and (ii) an ID-based collaborative embedding model (IdEmb) trained on interaction-derived positives. At serving time, we construct user representations from recent watch history and inject text- and ID-based user-item cosine similarities into a pairwise XGBoost ranker. We evaluate with temporally held-out offline datasets and a three-week online controlled experiment. Offline, for sessions with user history, the personalized ranker improves NDCG@10 by 2.99% and MRR by 3.30% over the non-personalized baseline. Slice analyses show that personalization is most needed in incremental search, where intent is still forming: on ambiguous prefix queries (1-3 characters), NDCG@10 lift is +8.63%, versus +1.46% on longer, fully specified queries. Longer-history users benefit more: NDCG lift rises from +2.13% for users with 1-5 history items to +4.37% for users with 51-100, even though baseline relevance is lower for these cohorts (NDCG@10 drops from 0.733 to 0.680), indicating that personalization adds the most value where default ranking underperforms. Online, treatment yields statistically significant gains of +1.14% tap-through rate and +1.23% conversion rate, with a 2.91% improvement in converted-item rank position. We further analyze coverage-precision trade-offs between semantic and collaborative embeddings via ablations isolating each signal, and evaluate embedding quality on a held-out corpus with LLM-judged similarity labels to reduce click/exposure bias.

Multilingual Semantic Retrieval for Apple Music Search

Apple Music serves listeners across 150+ storefronts in dozens of languages, with a catalog that grows by hundreds of thousands of new tracks daily. At this scale, search recall on misspelled, transliterated, and cross-lingual queries becomes a dominant driver of session quality, particularly for tail queries that account for the majority of unique queries. We present a multilingual semantic retrieval system built on a 305M-parameter Siamese bi-encoder fine-tuned from GTE-multilingual-base with curriculum-scheduled multi-objective training. The model is integrated into the search stack via a hybrid retrieval architecture that blends dense nearest-neighbor results with the existing token-based index using quantile distribution matching, enabling deployment without retraining downstream rankers. Offline, the model achieves a 69% relative improvement in Hit@10 over GTE-multilingual-base. In a worldwide online A/B test, the system delivers a 2.28% relative conversion-rate (CR) lift overall, an 86% reduction in the no-result rate, and gains across every storefront with no observed regressions. The improvement is concentrated where it is needed most: tail queries see a 7.93% relative CR lift, compared with 0.89% for mid-frequency queries and 0.14% for head queries -- evidence that semantic retrieval improves recall on hard queries without disturbing well-served popular ones. To our knowledge, this is one of the largest search-quality improvements deployed on the platform.