Retail giant Walmart is launching a new search engine for its company Web site in order to help shoppers browse and discover items more quickly and easily. Launched on Thursday, Aug. 30, the new Polaris search engine was built from scratch over the last 10 months by a small team within Walmart's research and technology arm, @WalmartLabs.

Polaris uses semantic search technology to anticipate a customer's intended search, thus delivering more relevant results. Walmart relies on this new search engine to better compete with rival online retailers, including e-commerce giants Amazon and eBay.

"Search is a crown jewel for any e-commerce company to own," said Neil Ashe, president and CEO of Walmart Global eCommerce. "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."

Walmart's new Polaris search engine uses "advanced algorithms including query understanding and synonym mining" in order to understand what users' searches mean, explained the company. If a customer searches for the term "denim," for instance, Polaris will offer results for jeans.

The retail company has been rolling out Polaris for a few months new, and it is already showing results. According to Walmart, it has seen a 10 to 15 percent increase in completed transactions after a customer searches for a product with the new Polaris search engine. Moreover, Polaris is also used for Walmart's mobile site, and will also expand to its international e-commerce sites over the next few months.

The search engine allows users to find the items they want more easily, and it also suggests additional items based on a customer's interests, said Sri Subramaniam, vice president of @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," he added.

Archrival Amazon is growing roughly five times faster than Walmart, which reported 2012 sales of $444 billion, but only generates about two percent of its revenue from e-commerce. CEO Mike Duke addressed the company's poor e-commerce performance in mid-August, in the company's second quarter fiscal year 2013 conference call for investors.

"We've been focused on stepping up the intensity of our global e-commerce opportunity," said Duke. "Our goal is to have a deeper relationship with our customers to drive greater loyalty and e-commerce is key to that strategy. We're also constantly driving innovation. We're building a new global platform to take our assortment and services to every one of our market simultaneously."