[Tepix]

For me, Amazon is a prime example of this. The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me.

I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it.

And after searching for neoprene shorts i accidentally bought shorts that weren't made of neoprene because they also appeared among the results.

Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad.

As a result, i avoid shopping on Amazon.

Shoutout to sites like geizhals.at that will let me filter by dozens of attributes per category to find the perfect product.

[PaulKeeble]

Aliexpress is just as bad as well, they have taken the Amazon model and ramped it to 11. Yet they don't seem to be intentionally mixing in bad results like Amazon is, instead because its all external sellers they are all embedding searched keywords to push their product in front of you. There are loads of shopNNNNNNNN based sellers doing this with various products that clearly don't last long. Both store designs only seem to exist due to having almost anything on them but the cost is long, complex and detail checking searches, they are minefields of wrong products.

Is Google.com even any better these days? It brings back a lot of results where the page appears to not even include the words I searched for far. I see the same thing on duckduckgo/microsoft now too.

When did searches that bring back results that don't match become the right answer? Its one thing when that happens with ads but they are doing it for pages that don't even pay them now (or at least don't declare they pay them, but it seems unlikely given the page contents).

[xp84]

My observation with Google is that an astonishing high percentage of their users stopped clicking organic search results around 2010 or so. They exclusively choose from amongst the top two or three ads, which they don’t even realize are ads since the indication of “what’s an ad” has gotten more and more subtle and the position of the first organic result has gotten lower and lower on the page to the point where today you generally would have to scroll a bit to find the first organic research result. The same users who only clicked the sponsored links before now don’t click any links, usually preferring to simply read the AI generated summary of some random spam results (which notably is far worse in accuracy than what you would get if you simply asked an LLM directly).

I think as a result, Google doesn’t really care about the quality of their organic search results since on the scale Google cares about, “nobody” clicks them anyway.

[mint2]

I like how the AI summary has had a 50% rate of directly contradicting itself between the first and last paragraphs in my recent searches.

It’s like an overly confident bullshitter with no shame and the memory of a fruit fly. And I’m sure many people trust it.

[AndrewStephens]

My conspiracy theory is that Google has been deliberately making its search results worse to subtly train users into engaging with ads and the AI assistant.

There is little reason why the AI Assistant can be a summary of the exact page you want, while that page is buried 8 deep in the search results behind a bunch of spam.

[YeahThisIsMe]

Google just changes and ignores your search terms and then serves you the results to whatever it wants instead.

[heavensteeth]

Recently I've had Google return results lacking search terms I've put in quotes (and then clicked "Show results for xxx instead" when it tries to 'correct' me). I have no idea how I'm supposed to make my desire any clearer.

[bityard]

It has been a long time since double quotes worked reliably for me on Google.

It has also been a long time since Google showed me any search results that weren't 100% ad-laden blogspam with wordy vague (and often incorrect) content with clickbait titles. I have basically given up on Google altogether.

[autoexec]

I stopped using Google at work when they forced javascript. Since then I realized that I haven't missed it at all and I've stopped using it entirely. It's become trash.

[Ma8ee]

What do you use instead?

[eitland]

This has been going on for over a decade for me now (I know because I blogged about it at the time).

For years I used DDG, not because it was better, but it wasn't worse and I wanted to support competition.

Then I started using Marginalia and shortly after I found Kagi.

Kagi works like Google used to do (and has a range of nice extra features) and in the very unusual situations were it doesn't work, when I posted it to the forums it was quickly acknowledged and dealt with.

Extremely refreshing to be on the customer side of a search engine the last three years instead of being some kind of livestock for Googles ad sales machine.

[caxon26]

Googles a little better about matching exact terms if you go to search tools -> all results and change it to Verbatim

[prepend]

Every single search. It’s funny to me that Google doesn’t let you default this setting and a sign they they are quite anti-user.

I wonder what employees of Google actually use. Is there a non-crappy version of Google that actually meets their needs and returns what they need?

[throwaway173738]

I just want a search engine that won’t return blogs with affiliate links or many results that are providing identical information.

[ungreased0675]

When I click a result and see Amazon links, it’s instant back button.

Why can’t Google’s algorithm determine that any page with a list of Amazon affiliate links is 99.999% low quality, low effort blogspam?

[bityard]

Because those pages also make Google a lot of money via ads. "Show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome."

[unstatusthequo]

Kagi.com

Allows you to customize results more than any I’ve used.

[eitland]

Try Marginalia :-)

[toasterlovin]

FWIW, Amazon's search algorithm is actually extremely simple: rankings are based on what people buy after searching for a particular term. To use your examples, the reason why Amazon is showing power strips when you search for "surge protectors" is because people often use the terms interchangeably. So, while this is bad for you, since you correctly distinguish the terms, it's actually better for people who use the terms interchangeably and do want a power strip when they search for surge protectors. And I think it's ambiguous what the correct behavior should be. Perhaps in the future some AI system will be able to help customers manage this kind of confusion, but we're not there yet.

Since inevitably someone will mention that the search results are littered with ads: yes, they are, and due to the same factor I mentioned above, it makes sense for sellers to advertise, say, power strips against the search term "surge protector." We run into a similar thing with "outdoor" rated wire. It's a term which technically means a rating for UV exposure. However, customers often use it to refer to wire that is rated for burial in the ground. So we advertise our burial rated cable against the "outdoor" search keyword. Gotta meet the customers where they are.

[mrandish]

I have no conceptual issue with Amazon serving ads against search terms. My big issue with Amazon search is that they intentionally made it much less useful by removing any ability to group words into one term with quotes or exclude any term with minus. These were working features of Amazon search that had long been there (and are probably still there in the code).

With the sheer number of products and the proliferation of feature or compatibility requirements buyers have to match, removing this functionality basically breaks Amazon search. Just try finding finding an LED bulb of a certain wattage that's dimmable. Every seller of non-dimmable bulbs puts the words "Not Dimmable" in their description to reduce returns. Amazon search will return all of those, with the listings I want buried somewhere in that flood - all because they've arbitrarily chosen to disable the standard, well-understood way of solving this common problem. The only solution is using an external search engine and limiting it to Amazon.com.

[oofManBang]

> I have no conceptual issue with Amazon serving ads against search terms.

I do. Ads have zero positive. They lower everyone's quality of life and stuff our heads full of useless crap like brand awareness. Truly a cancer on society in every conceivable way.

[mrandish]

I agree ads are annoying and I wish they weren't there (and for me, they're mostly not because: uBlock Origen). My point was that conceptually in-store advertising has been a thing for over a hundred years. Retailers have always merchandised their inventory.

However, breaking existing basic functionality like Search with the specific intention of making it harder and take longer for users to find what they want goes beyond annoying to malicious.

[lmpdev]

It’s funny, I sell wire

To me “outdoor” rated wire means has strands of tinned copper. Pure copper corrodes so much faster than jackets fail from UV damage

We use the term “solar cable” to refer to a UV resistant jacket, but we use that term half incorrectly - as solar cables have a bunch of different parameters other than just the UV

Unfortunately I think the only true solution is something like McMaster-Carr or Digikey

Maybe we’re a dog chasing its tail thinking a single universal search box is feasible, when it may simply be impossible for all users?

[quickthrowman]

I like shopping by email at work, it’s easy. I send three people an email saying ‘How much for 60,000 feet of 18/2 shielded wet rated cable’ and they send me a quote. They quote me exactly what I’m asking for, I review the quotes and send back a PO number. I wish internet shopping was that easy!

[terribleperson]

Shopping on McMaster-Carr is like I've been transported into an alternate universe where websites exist to serve the user.

[LeifCarrotson]

geizhals.at is regrettably only available in Austria, Germany, and the EU, but other sites I've used with similar good parametric search and filter are digikey.com (electronics engineering), https://at.rs-online.com (more electronics engineering), and McMaster.com (industrial manufacturing).

I've observed that developing and maintaining a database with the relevant attributes for each component is a ton of work and becomes a huge value-add for a distributor with technically inclined customers. It cannot be outsourced to manufacturers, as they have no incentive to match their schema to other manufacturers, and it cannot be outsourced to marketplace sellers, as they too lack this incentive. Both groups want their products to appear in as many searches as possible. Only the distributor wants exclusively the correct products to show up for a limited search and is in a position to enforce consistency across different marketplace listings and manufacturers.

[kspacewalk2]

On a side note, McMaster.com is the very best online shopping site I've ever visited or used. It's blazing fast (a trick based on pre-fetching that you can observe in all its glory in the developer view of your favourite browser), it's logical, uncluttered - perfect.

[0_____0]

This efficiency extends to their customer support ops as well. I ordered the wrong size of a bin, sent a message in their chat saying I wanted to return the bins and get the ### SKU instead, and without any further input from me, there were new bins delivered 2 days later.

They seem to have the assumption that their customers are actually trying to get some shit done.

[GIFtheory]

This 100%. McMaster quietly perfected e-commerce at some point, and because we’re live in a fallen world, nobody decided to follow their lead. If only we could convince McMaster to sell toilet paper and cereal…

[quickthrowman]

McMaster is expensive for certain things but if you need something very specific next day, they’re invaluable.

[silon42]

We need a Europe version of that.

[fc417fc802]

Having marketplace sellers do it could probably work if the moderation had teeth. But (for example) I've reported intentionally miscategorized listings on ebay only to have an automated system reject the report.

[immibis]

On a related note, https://segor.de/ doesn't have great search (and they don't remotely attempt to carry every component, and note that a whole lot of German component names look nothing like their English counterparts) but the technical design of their online catalog is interesting - it's a fast single-page app with about 3MB of data, so when you navigate the catalog it doesn't do any network round-trips except to fetch images.

[Narishma]

Youtube search is similar. It shows a couple of results related to your query, then a whole bunch of irrelevant videos.

[coliveira]

Search companies like Google reached the conclusion that search results need to be another form of infinite scrolling. They will spend little time doing real search and then flood the results with what they really want people to see.

[jcynix]

And YouTube isn't really interested to improve their suggestions: when I say "Not interested" to a suggestion, they ask why not with two idiotic possible answers: a) I've already seen it or b) I don't like it.

If a) would be the case, they most of the time would know it and if b) would be the case, I would have seen it too and thus a).

Examples: I use Canon and Fuji gear for taking pictures, but they offer me Nikon or Sony related videos. If they would actually have some interest to optimize suggestions, they would offer me to say "I'm not interested in Nikon/Sony/whatever" … wouldn't they?

Or Amazon, offering me Sony lenses for my Fuji. Or more of Thing-X after buying some Thing-X yesterday. But I only need exactly one new Thing-X, which their stupid "AI" Rufus should know by now if their suggestion machinery didn't know it already ;-0

[filoeleven]

I’ve stopped using “not interested” because it’s so shitty and pointless. It has no effect whatsoever on the other videos YT decides to show me. I swear when I clicked “I’ve already watched this video” the Home Screen would show more previously-watched videos than before.

I aggressively nuke channels instead, and use a ublock script to hide anything with a red bar (which means I previously watched it).

[milesrout]

I find it very effective.

[thinkmassive]

Yep, the irrelevant videos are clearly targeted based on viewing history, but a completely separate topic from the search, and often with clickbait titles.

Tangentially related, I typically queue multiple videos, and within the past year YouTube has started inserting new videos into my queue. It’s always one by the same person of the currently playing video, placed next in the queue, and it only gets inserted after watching the current video for some period of time.

That last part made it difficult to diagnose. It’s extremely annoying and feels like gaslighting because it’s never a video I actually have an interest in watching.

Has anyone found a way to disable this?

[teabee]

The browser extension "Unhook" for YouTube gives you full customization of what content presentations display and auto play etc. Even allows to remove the home page, which is designed to distract. For phones, I recommend using your web browser instead of the app. Using your phone web browser also allows for using adblock so it's a double win minus the less usable interface

[close04]

I pay for Youtube and see in the results a lot of irrelevant videos that have nothing to do with my search or viewing history.

But it gets so much worse. I leave the "smart downloads" feature enabled in Youtube Music on my phone because sometimes it discovers and downloads some gems for me. Again and again it downloads "artists" and music genres that I went out of my way to never have to listen to. To add insult to injury it sometimes refuses to delete those playlists for hours after I click the button. One time I had to clear all the downloads just to remove that trash.

There is no "organic" explanation for this as much as I'd dig for one. This is Youtube taking money to push a product.

[Cthulhu_]

Amazon has been pretty horrible for ages, but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor, one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.

[MyPasswordSucks]

First and foremost, you have to understand why people use Amazon. Amazon has a good chance of having whatever it is I'm looking for, the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere, and the shipping (with Prime, in the US, can't speak for UK/EU/RoW) absolutely can't be beat. People don't generally feel like messing around on three or four different websites to find the item, add it to their cart, and start the checkout process to determine how long the shipping will take and how much it'll cost, so the mental heuristic of "Amazon shipping is always free and if it's the sort of thing I'd find at Walgreens it'll usually be same-day/next-day" is incredibly valuable for Amazon.

So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment.

Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed.

So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".

[autoexec]

> the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere

I've increasingly found that prices on amazon are higher than you'd pay on the manufacturers website. Sometimes much higher. It's worth checking. Some sites have been cheaper and had free shipping. The only catch is that shipping times were 3-5 weeks as opposed to the 3-14 days it would take for prime's 3 day shipping to actually show up.

[mindslight]

So many terrible trends are driven purely by people's over reliance on mobile phones. When you're at a personal computer, it's not terribly hard to search for the same product on multiple web stores and see which one makes the most sense, or build up a cart over a few days to hit a shipping minimum. "Fast" shipping is overstated for Amazon and overrated for most purchases - on average, with the Sunk Cost Fallacy membership, it's maybe a day or two quicker than other web stores. If you really do need something urgently then it's worth it to spend a little effort comparing who can actually get it to you the quickest. And over time you build up a regular intuition of where to shop for various types of things, and for many things independent stores have much better curation. Weighing competitive options is only hard when you've disempowered yourself by using a tiny touch screen with an attacker-owned operating system.

[abracadaniel]

A few years ago I noticed that my shipments all took a week or more regardless, but other retailers would have it here in a day or two, sometimes same day. Cancelled prime and haven’t regretted it.

[coliveira]

> "Amazon shipping is always free"

No, Amazon shipping is not always free. It is only if you pay for Prime membership or if it's above certain price.

[MyPasswordSucks]

I pay for Prime, so that's my mental heuristic. Plenty of other people are in the same boat. For those who don't pay for Prime, "free over $35" is an acceptable drop-in replacement.

[autoexec]

Even if you pay for prime not everything sold on amazon is "prime eligible"

[mrguyorama]

> but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor

Why does this confuse you? It's the same in every single industry in the US right now.

Go ahead, try and start up a competitor to Amazon. Most likely you will just fail for normal business reasons, but if you ever even come close to being a threat, Amazon will just immense weight to steal your market out from under you. They can subsidize anything they want with AWS profits and can outspend you in any direction.

Meanwhile the DOJ will look away from obvious anti-competitive behavior because Reagan was a moron who thought regulating markets was magically bad.

Even Google ran into this with Fiber. Everywhere they went, Spectrum and Comcast just dropped prices to make Google's offer not very impressive, which is easy for them to do since they've spent decades extracting unbounded profits and paying off infrastructure investments, so their costs will be lower than any market entrant. Demonstrating like this that you COULD have significantly lowered prices but just chose not to SHOULD make people angry at you, but Americans are allergic to requiring companies actually be good for consumers.

This is the clear, obvious, trivial direction that any market operating in a capitalistic system is attempting to become. People need to stop being surprised.

If you want a competitive market, that doesn't happen naturally. You must force it.

[coldpie]

Honestly? I just drive over to Best Buy now. Yeah it costs a few bucks more and I have to leave the house (this is actually a good thing), but I can be certain that the box on the shelf that says "surge protector" is actually a surge protector and I don't need to spend 15 frustrating minutes sorting through intentionally misleading trash to find it and then cross my fingers that what I order is what I actually receive.

[pixl97]

The best buys in my area are getting kind of sketch in the past few years. Numerous empty shelves. Products sitting on the floors in boxes not put up for display. Wish I had a Microcenter close.

[everforward]

Microcenter’s commission scheme has made their sales people intolerable. Last time I was in there I had to tell no less than 6 employees I was perfectly comfortable choosing a router and DisplayPort cable without them.

I am also capable of reading the back of the box. It’s actually much easier without having employees interrupt and hover around me.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

All the stores are like this now, not just Best Buy. Walmart used to be, as I remember it, this insane level of consumerism store where the shelves were overfilled and there was no product so niche that they didn't have at least a few of nearly any product you can imagine. They used to sell hard drives, for fuck's sake, even if it seems like they were locked behind the glass near the electronics checkout. Now you go in there, and it's just a wasteland. Home Depot no longer sells home improvement or hardware store goods... it tries to sell the cheap junk you'd think would be in the Walmart. There are no tools at Home Depot unless a contractor would use them. Absolutely nothing for woodworking (I seem to remember them carrying at least one display piece for a wood lathe back around 1999-2003), now there are no table saws. I often end up going with my wife or my daughter to Michael's or Hobby Lobby, the former has reduced their store inventory so much that the only way to hide it was to remove shelves and spread them thinner so that you could march a school band through the aisles without them having to step closer to each other. The latter has changed their inventory to have fewer craft supplies, and more Temu-style junk.

Big box stores are all dying or dead.

[0_____0]

HD revenue is 250% ish vs what it was 15 years ago. Currently at ATH. Hard to say they're dying.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Adjusted for inflation? With how many new stores in that timeframe?

[zargon]

Also, Amazon cedes control of their supply chain to any rando who will ship them product. So it’s just as likely that you receive a power strip without surge protection, even if it claims to have it.

[oofManBang]

I don't really care about knockoffs (hell, I would happily shop on a site that ONLY sold knockoffs for basically everything but electronics), I just want to spend as little time actually looking through products as possible. Google is good for a lot of things but finding good places to buy stuff is not one of them. The entire process of making a profile and entering payment information is sufficient to ensure I don't buy from your site at all.

Tbh, amazon should probably be run as a public service. We've long since passed the point where their profit incentives benefit anyone but shareholders. By about fifteen-twenty years by my estimate.

[scotty79]

I think it was horrible form the start. When e-commerce was starting to be a thing it was quickly establish how a store should look, what should it have and where. Like when TVs were made everybody settled on a rectangular display pretty quickly. Amazon is sort of first of TV companies that initially made their first commercial TV a globe and ignoring that every other competitor started making rectangular TVs pretty quickly Amazon to this day manufactures globe TVs and they still sell, not because they are good or what people think TV should look like, but just because they are cheap and delivery is convenient.

[lotsofpulp]

Buying land (or renting), building warehouses, and employing people to move stuff is extremely costly.

>one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.

This is kind of the space that Costco/Nordstrom/Apple/Best Buy/Lowes/Home Depot/Staples occupy. But even they find it tough, so more and more allow 3rd party sellers to make money off the platform, even if it lowers the brand value in the long term.

[carlosjobim]

Because other retailers treat their customers like pieces of shit. That's it. Everybody has been burnt, shoppers want to be able to purchase safely. Price, interface, and everything else is of less importance.

Will other retailers start treating their customers like human beings? Not a chance in hell. They'd rather let Amazon bankrupt them than do that.

[lazystar]

...isn't that basically Costco.com? the trade-off is that you can't sell a million different things if you want to ensure quality among all the things you sell

[HWR_14]

There is a middle ground between a carefully curated list of vendors and any company can fill out some paperwork and signup.

[lotsofpulp]

Technology and automation (especially software) allow 90% of the market to be grabbed by 10% of the sellers, or even 1%.

It is tough (seemingly impossible) for the middle ground to exist in this environment.

[drew870mitchell]

We (us, the people reading here, the demographic building the software and technology and automation) would do well as a community to spend more time on introspection about what ends it serves that tech, which was sometimes promoted as a great equalizer, gets built so often in practice only to make the walls of an aspiring monopolist's fortress more steep with no benefit to anybody else.

[int_19h]

Technological advancement by itself merely creates the potential for equalization. Whether that potential is actually realized depends on the culture of society, though. You can use the same basic tech to build Star Trek communism or a cyberpunk dystopia.

[_DeadFred_]

Unironically

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04

We as an industry are seen as defined by crap/enshitification now. The world gave us good faith, cheered us on, mostly excitedly hyped us. And we picked, by small choice after small choice, this.

[bee_rider]

Does anybody live in that middle ground?

[mananaysiempre]

Amazon ten years ago?

[lazystar]

id argue that amazon is the middle ground; temu has lower quality

[tonyedgecombe]

Someone should tell the person in charge of Apple’s App Store that.

[wnc3141]

If you look at Walmart and others most 3rd party sellers just duplicate their listing across platforms. E-commerce has fewer "competitors" and more carbon copies

[dudeinjapan]

The biggest problem I have with Amazon is that after I buy something, for example AA batteries, Amazon will then recommend me only batteries, like I am the ultimate battery collecting hipster of the world. “AA’s? If you’re into mainstream, I guess. But check out these CR2032s, they can power vintage calculators.”

[asah]

from insider eng sources, the search quality mess is not intentional.

I worked on various commerce search engines, and briefly ran Google Shopping back in the day - surprisingly hard problem !

[blueflow]

We know this is a lie because it worked pretty well until like 2015? 2020?

[bee_rider]

It is hard to say either way I think…

Amazon sellers, lots of them don’t work for Amazon, right? Their incentive is to show up in searches, and the one who takes the reputation hit when they game the system and show up in the wrong search is mostly Amazon, not them. So, it would 0% surprise me if Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties being indexed, like Google is.

Not saying this is definitely the case, but it seems like a plausible alternative theory.

And, it probably won’t get better. In 2015 these companies were at the tail end of being new and interesting. In 2025 they are the slow entrenched incumbents.

[coliveira]

> Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties

No, this is by design. Amazon has no problem whatsoever in banning sellers that do things they don't like. It definitely helps Amazon to keep this state of things.

[bee_rider]

I wonder if somebody will come along to defend that position that your edited version of my post is proposing. It would be interesting to see somebody defend it (I’m not interested in doing so, though).

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it.

I have done exactly that. Some of the "mixins" are really strange, and have nothing at all to with what I'm looking for, so I have to assume that are paid keyword poisoning.

[oyashirochama]

There's also the well known, name change that happens. Where the product used to be a different item/SKU tied to the product on Amazon. Used to poison ratings a LOT.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad.

That's Amazon's recommender model. If you buy shoes you're like other people who buy shoes, including ones with different shoe sizes. So you may want shoes in different sizes.

My fellow Greeks know how the algorithm works:

https://scontent-lhr8-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/470673830...

[crazygringo]

> The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me.

Does it? It seems to return things with my search terms just fine. What is usually the case is that there are lots of items with some of those search terms that are also popular.

I see no evidence that Amazon is trying to make its regular search worse.

With sponsored listings there's a separate issue if sellers are bidding on keywords, but that's also to be expected.

It makes sense for Amazon to show other products on product pages and in checkout (as it does). But doing it intentionally during search would seem counterproductive. The reality is just that search is hard, and people are often bad at entering search terms.

[wat10000]

Sponsored listings are an obvious way that Amazon is deliberately making their search worse.

[crazygringo]

I think it's obvious that when we talk about search results, we're talking about search results, not ads.

Saying that ads make things worse isn't an interesting observation. That's just the internet. It's nothing specific to search.

[wat10000]

When the ads are interleaved into the organic results with only a tiny gray "Sponsored" label to differentiate them, that's making search worse. Amazon is the one mixing them up, not me.

[crazygringo]

The point is, we can measure the quality of organic search results, that's the topic here, and I don't see any evidence of Amazon engaging in this "Gruen transfer" for organic search results.

Obviously putting ads in search is going to worsen the overall quality of search+ads. But that's not an interesting observation to make because we all know that already. It's by definition. And it's clear Amazon is doing that to make money from the ads, again not as a "Gruen transfer" effect.

[AlexandrB]

I think you're being too charitable. The user doesn't just experience the organic search results but the whole thing, ads and all. It's entirely Amazon's choice which ads to run when and where so you can't rule out intentional "Gruen transfer" in the overall results by placing ads for maximum confusion.

[schiffern]

  >[It isn't "Gruen transfer" because it's an ad to make money.]

Why would that particular carve-out be considered part of the definition of "Gruen transfer?"

Seems more like clicking on ads is the end and Gruen transfer (via intentionally confusing ads with search results) is the means.

FTA: "The 'Transfer' part is the moment that you, as a consumer surrounded by a deliberately confusing layout, lose track of your original intentions." This still seems perfectly applicable to me?

FTA: "The last time I checked Facebook, maybe 10% of my feed was updates from friends. The rest was a combination of ads, memes, and influencer marketing videos..." So putting ads in lists where they don't belong is explicitly included in the definition, despite your attempt to exclude it.

[notepad0x90]

This is so weird to me. I'm always hearing people having issues with Amazon but I have a near perfect experience shopping on there or with consuming entertainment on Prime.

Honestly, I feel guilty about it because I really dislike Bezos and Amazon's reputation as a terrible employer, yet they make a damn good product.

If you know of a better shopping site that delivers similar or better quality experience, please do let me know. I'll look into geizhals.at , but even for electronics, I've found Amazon better than dedicated sites like newegg because I find what I'm looking for, it is good quality and shipping times are amazing.

Perhaps it's a location issue, does Amazon have a worse service for non-US people?

[VladVladikoff]

Try sorting results by price. In my experience it doesn’t actually work. It puts items in featured order regardless. And if you dig through enough you can find cheaper items further down.

[notepad0x90]

I've tried messing with the sorting, and I've always found "Featured" is what I want. If I want something cheap I'd go to temu. I've never wanted "the most expensive" thing just because either. If cheaper is better quality, it tends to bubble up to the top when you sort by reviews because more people will buy the cheaper thing that has good quality (unless it's brand new).

[scotty79]

Apparently you are an ideal Amazon customer. I knew there has to be one somewhere.

[_DeadFred_]

As someone who used Amazon, stopped, then comes back from time to time, it's crap. You've been trained to it, it hasn't been optimized for you.

From my life, if you feel like you shouldn't but still do, you should stop/check yourself. Applies to the hard things in life, but also the easy ones like not using a store.

[c-linkage]

My suspicion is that Amazon -- in addition to having paid product placement -- probably has engagement metrics. If you have to dig into the details on every product in the search to find exactly what you're looking for, that increases engagement.

[m463]

I kind of wonder if without this, results would be minimal.

What if your amazon search for neoprene shorts said: "there are only 3 available in your size, all only available in plaid."

What if netflix told you: "you watched all the good scifi movies"

but we could dream right?

I would love for the amazon search results to have sidebar checkboxes that had a 3-way toggle.

Like if you searched for an air purifier and one of the features was wifi. It would be great if you could leave it alone, toggle it to check it (with wifi), or toggle it again to X it (without wifi)

would be great to search for dumb tvs

[neither_color]

The most aggravating part is it ignores booleans. Sometimes I want to search for very specific things that are variants of hyper-competitive SEO-slop, only without feature x. Like if I want to search for functional lamps that take bulbs (not integrated LEDs). I should be able to search for Lamp -LED without it showing me a thousand led lamps (and upselling me a purchase protection plan when I add to cart. )

[throwaway173738]

you can buy bulb sockets and lamp cord at the hardware store.

[neither_color]

I'll humor this patronizing reply chain to add that online shopping, despite its flaws and lack of boolean search, has a better selection and long tail variety than local brick and mortar establishments that all hassle you with warranty protection plan upsells and customer loyalty points anyway. Even the rare shop that can beat Amazon on price and selection, like Microcenter, still tries to guilt trip you with extended warranties and $80 "ram installation" service.

[coliveira]

Amazon has infected the minds of lots of people to a point where they'll spend half an hour sifting through garbage listings in their horrible web site and then wait a full day to receive the product, instead of going to the corner store and buy what they know they want.

[immibis]

It's incredible, right? But what causes it? And is it connected to all the other facets of the mass dumbing-down of the entire population?

[rendaw]

If I search for something in a category with "too few" results amazon redirects the search to "all products"... even when I know exactly what I want.

And lately, even more infuriatingly, they started modifying my search terms! Like, I'll search for "hoover 2100" and some javascript will, after a second, change it to "hover 2100" and then show me completely irrelevant junk. And I go and change it back, and the javascript modifies it again! Not just showing the wrong results, but gaslighting me into thinking I had actually searched for the wrong thing, that the poor results were my fault!

This isn't dumb stuff like bad categorization, or missing search facets, or all the other low effort issues... It's like they're actively trying to prevent me from buying things!

[wodenokoto]

When searching for a dehumidifier, 80% of the results are humidifiers.

I’ve always thought it was NLP gone awry (stripping prefixes, searching in vector space instead of characters)

But maybe it’s just shitty on purpose to keep you around.

[anthonyrstevens]

This is not my experience. I just did a search for "dehumidifer" and ALL of the first 50 results are for dehumidifiers. The 51st result is for:

Vacplus Moisture Absorbers 6 Pack, 10.5 Oz Portable Humidity Absorber Boxes for Your Bathroom, Closet & Car, Dehumidifier with Fragrance

...which is related, no?

[wodenokoto]

You’re right. I guess it was nlp gone awry when I looked for one 2 years ago but now it’s fixed.

Only the sponsored results are not dehumidifiers when I just did a search.

Sorry for the noise.

[mrandish]

That this effect and related 'enshittification' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is now prevalent everywhere is really depressing to me. Here's why. I recently retired somewhat early from a career spent entirely in high tech creating new kinds of products and services. Often, products that made life better for users by empowering them to do things they couldn't do before and sometimes solving old problems better, faster and cheaper.

That whole time, I had an underlying belief that those of us in "the industry" (high tech entrepreneurial startups) were generally making the world better, whether in large ways like personal empowerment or small ways like making daily life easier, more efficient or, sometimes, even more delightful. In some sense, I felt like I was a small part of a larger march toward the kind of better future which so inspired me in the sci-fi books I read as a kid.

Over the last five years I've increasingly seen mainstream tech products and services adopting dark patterns or abusing customer's time or trust in other ways. Of course, there were always a few companies that sucked, either due to incompetence or just being unethical but most everyone agreed they were bad. But now using dark patterns, or just taking steps to actively make the product experience worse for users, is no longer an aberration or regression - it's apparently accepted as normal. High tech leaders from FAANG on down are ALL knowingly doing this shit. It's on KPIs. Teams of competent professional technologists are collecting bonuses for intentionally making their product or service worse for millions of users.

Right before I retired I actually saw this starting to happen in the company I was at. I was in meetings where some of my coworkers seriously proposed doing obviously wrong things, arguing it would boost "the metrics". Being a senior exec, I was mostly able to correct this by pointing out customer satisfaction, loyalty and confidence in our brand were the most important metrics, but it did feel 'off'. At first I dismissed it as a handful of employees with mis-calibrated values but it kept happening. Eventually, the CEO overruled me on one of these "values"-based product decisions. It really bothered me because, even though it was dressed up in polite language, it was clearly just about burning customer goodwill to boost a short-term metric. At the time, I assumed the company was just slowly losing its way. Most of my fellow execs hadn't ever shipped a 1.0 or been through winning over customers one at a time. Frankly, this change in ethos factored into my decision to retire. It's not like I expected every product decision to go my way but these weren't subjective judgements. And over the years I'd certainly made my share of product mistakes which negatively impacted customer's (oops!) but I fixed them and learned to do better. But it just felt weird (and really bad) to be doing the wrong thing on purpose. Sure, some of these things would boost metrics and revenue, at least in the short-term, but I found I couldn't get myself to stop believing the best way to increase revenue was to keep making our product experiences even better.

When I was in my late 20s and flying off to yet another trade show like Comdex, I sat next to a guy who worked for Marlboro cigarettes. It was fascinating talking with him and hearing the careful rationalizations about creating a product which obviously was bad for their customers and addictive to boot. I remember telling my coworkers at dinner that night about how weird it was to meet someone like that - and how lucky we were to be in high tech, where we got paid to build products that just kept getting better and generally helped make the world better - at least in some small way. Sure, I knew that progress would sometimes be two steps forward, one step back, but I guess I was naive to have never even imagined this future.

[jofla_net]

>Most of my fellow execs hadn't ever shipped a 1.0 or been through winning over customers one at a time.

This is one of the largest roots of atrophy in the industry, currently. "Customers" are taken as a given, and there's no connection to them any longer. "High-Tech" is effectively now like Sears.

[piotrpdev]

Thanks for sharing, it's unfortunate so many companies are short-sighted these days.

[_DeadFred_]

I already posted this in this thread but unironically this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04

Tech leaned so heavy into enshitification it has become it, to the point an entire word was coined to explain what tech was turning the world around us into. Tech still thinks 'but I'm a good person/we're doing good so.... XYZ is OK' and isn't willing to even see how they actually chose to present themselves.

[mrandish]

I guess I was just lucky that my entire adult working life basically spanned the democratization of personal computers and digital communications from the 80s up to a few years ago. I never knowingly shipped anything that intentionally made things harder, less powerful or less efficient. On the contrary, everything I was involved with was substantially faster, better and more powerful than existing alternatives. And usually cheaper too. I guess people starting careers in high tech today will either have to make some hard ethical choices or get good at rationalizing doing bad things.