Problem Statement and Metrics

Airbnb rental search ranking

1. Problem statement

Airbnb users often search for homes in a specific location. The platform must return relevant stays—but more than that, it must return homes users are likely to book. So the goal of the ranking system is simple:

Rank the homes such that those most likely to be booked appear higher in the search results.

A naive method might use keyword matching or hand-crafted scoring—like sorting based on similarity between the query and listing descriptions. But this fails in practice. Text similarity might show results that “sound good,” but don’t necessarily lead to bookings.

Instead, we want a data-driven approach. If we could ...