[hakfoo]

I have to wonder if it's fundamentally appealing to a different type of customer.

You don't window-shop Digi-key. You're pretty much buying on spec sheets alone. I want to see all 330 ohm 1/4 watt through-hole resistors, now sort by price and availability in the quantity I need, then maybe discard products that don't meet some other criteria that I can't directly filter for. There's very little chance of making a sale through a slicker marketing campaign.

Conversely, people buying a single monitor might be browsing, potentially swayed by the right language and graphics on the landing pages. I'm pretty sure those bloody finches sold more ViewSonic monitors than any other aspect of their product line. For a window-shopping customer, getting the customer to see as many of them as possible improves their chances of a sale.

On the other hand, I will concur that Amazon's search is a disaster for computer products. I suspect it's also terrible in other verticals that have clear, well-defined "faceted search" concepts, but we probably have the most experience with that one here. I suspect it may be a casualty of their broadness of categories-- why spend the labour to provide really killer search if it hasn't proven to be an impediment to sales yet?