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by igorlev 2808 days ago
Results like these are not always malice, as other commenters pointed out search by price is not well figured out yet.

There are some issues with relevance ranking for price where junk rises to the top when you sort by price (https://medium.com/@dtunkelang/why-is-it-so-hard-to-sort-by-...) and Amazon may just be cutting off lower relevancy items when you sort by price as a heuristic.

2 comments

Why would they show me one list of things when I search at first and then show less when I sort by price? That doesn't make sense and sorting is not that difficult. In ebay sorting does exactly what I would expect.
Did you read the article? They're trying to filter out lower relevance items, so that when you search "coffee maker" and sort by price, you don't get a 2.95 coffee filter instead.
But when I search for coffee maker without sort they show coffee filters. Just sort that list by price and let me figure out how to deal with coffee filters. In my opinion a sort should not change the content of the list.
And if they can figure out which ones are not coffee makers, why not show the list without coffee filters to start with?
Because I do not trust them? I've seen them get it wrong -- and once you know that "sort by price" may not, in fact, give you the lowest price, it becomes completely useless.

I would not mind if the filtering was optional; but it is not, so this is one more reason to avoid Amazon.

Product search and discovery is a hard problem, but not the hard problem they've chosen to make it in to.

It's a fiddle.