Wal-Mart Stores, Inc has just launched a new search engine for its company website. Dubbed as Polaris, the new Walmart search engine is targeted at increasing customer acquisition and shopper conversion rate, as it will help users quickly browse and discover items.

Walmart has done this to compete with its tech-savvy competitors–Amazon and eBay. Polaris is created by retail giant’s in-house tech team from @Walmart Labs, and utilizes semantic search technology to anticipate a shopper’s intended search and deliver more relevant results.

“Search is a crown jewel for any e-commerce company to own,” Neil Ashe, president and CEO Walmart Global eCommerce, said in a statement. “Today’s announcement underscores our commitment to owning technology that is fundamental in giving our millions of customers anytime, anywhere access to the products they want at the lowest prices.”

The new search engine is doing well, and so far, the retail giant has seen around 10-15 percent increase in purchase-making shoppers, after launching the new search engine. As search is a critical success factor for any ecommerce website, Walmart is using this technology to empower its website. Polaris is also used for mobile search, and will soon empower the Walmart’s international e-commerce sites too.

“With Polaris, we are giving users the ability to connect with the items they want but also surface items based on their interests and likely intent,” said Sri Subramaniam, vice president for @WalmartLabs and head of the Polaris initiative. “This is the start of what we imagine search to be as we continue to deliver products to accelerate Walmart’s global e-commerce efforts.”

With this development, the retail giant is quickly moving on to flexing their digital muscle. Last year, Walmart acquired OneRiot, a startup that helps companies to better target their social media and mobile ads. As WalMart’s digital business is gradually building up momentum, this acquisition was a strategic step toward expanding its digital product portfolio. Prior to that, Walmart acquired a California-based social media platform Kosmix, highlighting its social and mobile strategy, with aim at bridging the gap between bricks and mortar stores, and e-commerce. Kosmix’s social media technology platform filters and organizes content according to what matters to the searcher. It is good that just like its competitors Walmart is also beefing up its digital strategy and doing a lot of efforts to keep itself upbeat in the market.