[masona]

Working at an agency that mostly did CPG work for P+G, I remember how so much of the design work was about catching someone's eye on shelf: how to stand out in a sea of packaging. Millions (and millions) of dollars were spent trying to crack the code.

But it's no longer a flat canvas where you can see everything all at once. The shelf is not flat, it's deep. You have to move through products one by one. In the article they say that the first spot is 'valuable.' More like 'life or death.'

[telchar]

I think the depth is inversely proportional to the utility of search - the better I can search for the combination of features, price, etc that I need the less deep the shelf gets. The endless generic white-labeled junk plus poor metadata really makes the problem bad though.

[luckylion]

Okay, that sounds conspiratorial, but: is that why Amazon's search is atrociously terrible, so that they can sell the top spots for more? If you could search by attributes reliably, the top spots lose relative value.

[preommr]

Well I doubt they actively try to make it worse.

But I would believe it if because of the lack of incentive, they din't make active efforts to improve it.