[probablybroken]

Personally, I find browsing amazon impossible simply due to the widespread mis-categorisation of products. It seems that suppliers just chuck everything into inappropriate categories in the hope that it gets them more views. This renders the platform useless for product discovery, and suggests that you might as well be searching for the product elsewhere. It also gives me the feeling of rummaging through a bargain basement shop, rather than the higher value store that I think Amazon used to be perceived as ( vs e.g, ebay ).

[DaiPlusPlus]

When I interviewed at Amazon a couple of years ago (for a team on the retail side of things, this was their bread-and-butter) I raised this very point with my interviewer, about my concerns over the data-quality issues I was having lately with item properties/attributes and miscategorization. My interviewer said the main problem was bad data coming from their Marketplace and other third-party vendors. - he said this is was why they recently (at the time) brought in the great minds and heavy-guns for machine-learning to fix all of these issues - and at the time (2016-2017) I noticed things were improving.

But lately - over the past year or so - I've seen things getting worse - I'm assuming because the problem of well-meaning but ultimately inadequate data from Marketplace sellers is now solved - but what remains is fighting bad data from intentionally incorrect metadata from malicious third-party sellers seeking to game the system - which we see today in spades with counterfeit sellers, for example.

Amazon's data-quality issue mirrors Google's perennial black-hat-SEO problem - I think it'll keep their teams occupied for decades at this rate.

(This is why I want to work on self-driving cars...)

[dhosek]

> (This is why I want to work on self-driving cars...)

This is why I’m skeptical (as much as I’d like not to be) about self-driving cars. Black-hat SEO, intentionally incorrect metadata, it’s why we can’t have nice things and it will impact self-driving cars as well.