Experimentation & Measurement for Search Engine Optimization

Our San Francisco headquarters has it all, from comfy nooks to sunlit views. It’s the… For many of our potential guests, planning a trip starts at the search engine. At Airbnb, we want our product to be painless to find for past guests, and easy to discover for new ones. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving our site — and more specifically…

Listing Embeddings in Search Ranking

By Mihajlo Grbovic, Haibin Cheng, Qing Zhang, Lynn Yang, Phillippe Siclait and Matt Jones Airbnb’s marketplace contains millions of diverse listings which potential guests explore through search results generated from a sophisticated Machine Learning model that uses more than hundred signals to decide how to rank a particular listing…

React Native at Airbnb

Years later, it’s still possible to book a meeting in our Airstream This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb. When Airbnb launched 10 years ago, smartphones were in their infancy. Since then, smartphones have become an essential tool to navigate our everyday…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In our first article we looked at the MvRx mocking system, and the Launcher that opens any screen or mock in the app. While…

Categorizing Listing Photos at Airbnb

Authors: Shijing Yao, Qiang Zhu, Phillippe Siclait Walking into our new office in San Francisco, meeting rooms evoke the variety of our… Airbnb is a marketplace featuring millions of homes. Travelers around the world search on the platform and discover the best homes for their trips. Aside from location and price, listing photos are one of the most critical factors for decision-making during a guest’s…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In previous installments of this series we laid out our state mocking system, and how we built UI integration testing on top of it. In…

Server Rendering, Code Splitting, and Lazy Loading with React Router v4

Challenge accepted. Nicole, one of our hosts, taking some guests on a sunrise walk and picnic above… Some Background on Server Rendering at Airbnb Historically, Airbnb has been a Rails app. A few years back that started to change, we began using Rails simply as a data layer, and all render logic started migrating into JavaScript in…

Inside Connect: An Apprentice Perspective

Connect 2020 Apprentices at Airbnb HQ Hi, I’m Ale. I was a Connect 2020 Apprentice and I’m going to write a bit about my experience with the program, especially for those who are interested in applying. To learn more about the goals and structure of the Connect program, take a look at Part 1 of this…

Building a faster web experience with the postTask scheduler

When was the last time you opened a page on a website and tried to click on something multiple times for it to work? Or the last time you swiped on an image in a carousel and it stuttered and shifted around unnaturally? While this type of experience happens far…

How Airbnb Achieved Metric Consistency at Scale

Part-I: Introducing Minerva — Airbnb’s Metric Platform By: Amit Pahwa, Cristian Figueroa, Donghan Zhang, Haim Grosman, John Bodley, Jonathan Parks, Maggie Zhu, Philip Weiss, Robert Chang, Shao Xie, Sylvia Tomiyama, Xiaohui Sun Introduction At Airbnb, we lean on data to inform our critical decisions. We validate product ideas through randomized controlled experiments, and we track our business performance…

React Performance Fixes on Airbnb Listing Pages

Airbnb has some incredible listings in Cuba…and also a corner of the office inspired by Habana Vieja We have been hard at work migrating the airbnb.com core booking flow into a single-page server-rendered app using React Router and Hypernova. At the beginning of the year, we rolled this out for…

Reconciling GraphQL and Thrift at Airbnb

The.WAV hosting AFROHAUS Brunch in Los Angeles a few months ago Backend Engineer: Hmm. So you’re saying this “GraphQL” will allow any web or native engineer to arbitrarily query basically any field in any backend service, recursively, however they want, without any backend engineers involved? Frontend Engineer: Yeah, right? It’s amazing! […silence…] Backend Engineer: Guards, seize this person. For several years…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In the previous article we detailed our test framework implementation. This was a high level look at the approach we take to running our tests…

WIDeText: A Multimodal Deep Learning Framework

By Wayne Zhang, Mia Zhao, Yuanpei Cao Deep learning (DL) is helping us at Airbnb serve our stakeholders better…

Building Services at Airbnb Part 3

By: Weibo He, Liang Guo A bright and spacious Airbnb Plus listing in London Airbnb is moving its infrastructure towards a service-oriented architecture. A reliable, performant, and developer-friendly polyglot service platform is an underpinning component in Airbnb’s architectural evolution. In Part 1 and Part 2 of our Building Services series, we shared how we used Thrift service IDL-centered service…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

Interaction Testing Part two of this series covered our screenshot testing approach. As our first integration tests, screenshots filled a gaping hole in our testing strategy and were immediately…

Operationalizing Node.js for Server Side Rendering

At Airbnb, we have spent years steadily migrating all Frontend code to a consistent architecture where entire web pages are written as a hierarchy of React components hydrated with data from our API. The role Ruby on Rails plays in getting the web to the browser is reduced every day…

A Deep Dive into Airbnb’s Server-Driven UI System

By Ryan Brooks Background: Server-Driven UI Before we dive into Airbnb’s implementation of server-driven UI (SDUI), it’s important to understand the general idea of SDUI and how it provides an advantage over traditional client-driven…

Project Lighthouse — Part 1: P-sensitive k-anonymity

Introduction In June, the Airbnb Anti-Discrimination product team announced Project Lighthouse, an initiative with the goal…

Scaling Knowledge Access and Retrieval at Airbnb

Cherry blossoms in full bloom in Tokyo Imagine you’re finally getting to take that vacation you’ve dreamed of — three countries, seven cities, thousands of miles. It’s everything you could want and more, right? But where do you start? How do you know what to eat, where to visit, how to experience what makes your destination truly…

Airbnb’s Promotions and Communications Platform

By Paritosh Aggarwal and Henry Wu Introduction Airbnb is a busy marketplace with millions of active users across the globe. Billions of messages…

Learning Market Dynamics for Optimal Pricing

How do you think market dynamics influences this beautiful home in Cape Town? Market dynamics plays a key role in matching guests with hosts in two-sided marketplaces such as Airbnb. Supply and demand vary drastically across different locations, different check in dates and different lead times until check-in. It is important for us to understand and forecast these spatial and temporal trends in…

What’s Next for Mobile at Airbnb

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts in which we outline our experience with React Native and what is next for mobile at Airbnb. Exciting Times Ahead Even while experimenting with React Native, we continued to accelerate our efforts on native as well. Today, we have a number of exciting…

Introducing visx from Airbnb

by Chris Williams & Harrison Shoff After 3 years of development, 2.5 years of production use at Airbnb, and a rewrite in TypeScript we are excited to announce the official 1.0 release of visx (formerly vx). You can find the project on GitHub and browse documentation and examples on airbnb.io. …

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

In part three of this series we saw how automated interaction testing can cover some of the code paths in our ViewModels by recording state changes. However…