Building AI Search for a Retail Website: The Stack and Why
I built Ozark Ridge, a mock outdoor gear retail site with AI-powered product search and a Rufus-style product assistant. The project exists to demonstrate RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) in a realistic e-commerce context. This is the first post in a series documenting the build. This one covers the architecture, the data and indexing pipeline, and the stack decisions behind the whole system. Later posts cover keyword vs semantic search, the AI assistant, and lessons learned. ...