[fancl20]

I heard they switched to fully use a recommending system for search (don't know how it works today but feels like that's still the case), which means there is there is no real search happening and you query is used as a hint, not a search query (which relativeness matters more).

At that time PDD is promoting the idea you buy what they think you will buy. PDD's search is barely functioning at that time and their bussiness model is solely relying on recommending system.

Though I'm not sure how much Alibaba's decision is affected by PDD because the story I heard is more driven by their internal politics. I feel like that's really a weird product decision for Alibaba and to me doesn't make a lot of sense.

[datadrivenangel]

That explains so much! Alibaba search randomly adds items I've previously bought to totally unrelated searches, so it does feel like a bad recommender system.

[dsab]

What is PDD?

[yorwba]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinduoduo

[gorbypark]

PDD (PinDuoDuo) is the owner of Temu, which is kinda but not exactly a western version of PDD.