Systems and methods for recommending content to an online service user are presented. In response to a request from a user, a set of n-grams of the request are generated, with each n-gram comprising one or more terms from the request and each n-gram of the set of n-grams being unique. Embedding vectors projecting the n-grams into a content item embedding space are generated, and the embedding vectors are combined into a representative embedding vector for the request. The nearest content items are identified according to a distance measure between a projection of the representative embedding vector and embedding vectors of content items of a corpus of content items in the content item embedding space. At least some of the nearest content items are returned as recommended content in response to the request from the user.