Pretty much every major shopping website has terrible search functionality.
I usually want something very specific, for example 60w dimmable e12 frosted warm led bulb. I have not found a single shopping website that won’t show me results without many of these terms in the description. I don’t want to see listings that say 40w and don’t say 60w anywhere, and it isn’t hard to filter them out!
Are these shopping websites bad on purpose? What’s in it for them?
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There’s nothing in it for them, the simple fact is that the virtual all of people does not look for specific terms.
Hence the search is optimised to give you loads of things that relate to some parts of your search at least.
Source: did backend code for shopping frontends for years.
The search is incredibly fuzzy, plus the tag words of products themselves are fuzzy. And usually they don’t allow forcing a hard match search, though you can try + or
andbetween each word. We had one site that allowed it, just use lucene search syntax.It turns out many of us do search for specific terms when we want specific items.
Do you? Then how come examples like OP’s don’t really specify much.
Is that any keyword? All keywords? Where? Tags? Title? Name? Description? If all, do they all have to appear int he same field(s)? Anywhere? On the whole page including crosssellers?
This is what to mean: it’s easy to say “just search for exactly this!”, but what you intuitively think of as “exactly this” is not intuitive from the perspective of a search index. At all. So it gets preprocessed and changes before being used for a search, and in many cases, widened. Because we humans are very bad at putting in an accurate search such as:
name:"60w" and description:"standby". We rarely do that.One of the points here was those syntaxes no longer work
- search engines are usually free text, with no concept about fields
- the syntax you specify usually depends on specific sites implementing “filtering” which is usually a lot more annoying to use, and people here complaining that no longer works. Plus that’s limited to a specific site
- google search specifically, used to accept syntax like quotes to match a phrase and plus or minus to indicate required presence or absence, but those no longer work.
- certainly part of it is merchandisers using SEO for greater attention rather than better match
I’m currently looking for a new light fixture and haven’t yet found the magical search phrase to get there or a site with filtering that works. Of course it may not exist but all my attempted searches so far return random junk, so I don’t even know
Because we humans are very bad at putting in an accurate search such as: name:“60w” and description:“standby”.
I actually really like to do that. These days that only seems to work for flights and hentai though.
Maybe if it was more available and people were taught to use it it could be a little more popular. I think fundamentally it’s not such a foreign concept to say that you want specific things from specific categories. People do that kind of thinking routinely when searching for homes or cars.
A % of customers won’t return an incorrect product so an accidental sale is still a sale. It sucks, but statistically benefits the company.
I get tricked now and then too by products that ended up not matching my search. So annoying.
I don’t see how it statistically benefits the company. Whether I sell you the right thing, or the wrong thing, I still sold you something. So why not try to make it the right thing so I come back?
Happened to me on amazon few years back… Really broke trust then.
Shopoing there has been kinda painful ever since then.
Been slowly using other online retailers to spread the spend.
Fuxk monopolies. So fucking tired of everyone acting like using the same guy for everything is convenient… Sure buddy. Enjoy the the warm water 🐸
Better yet, there’s sites that have filters you can set. So you set the wattage filter to 60w and then…. no fucking results. But if you clear the filter, there’s lots of results, because it turns out their entire inventory has a wattage of “n/a”.
It adds insult to injury, since it shows that they expect that some people will want to apply those filters, but then they don’t care enough to make the filters work. They just waste even more of my time by creating the false impression that they have made a tool that does what I want.
I work in a company that helps shop owners with their shops. Some shop software has bad search as a default. You need a skilled person to configure it. We do it for some, but others don’t care. And then there’s people who think they can do it better, with varying results.
I guess that’s why Amazon search is so bad. It really feels like some boss ordered his tech staff around to add too many things, like substitutions, translations etc., and now it’s crap.
Amazon search is so bad because we wind up having to doomscroll to find that damn thing we’re looking for. Like putting milk in the back of the grocery store. You can type ‘Adidas’ and wind up digging through Nikes
I think Amazon search is intentionally “bad”, as it suggests unrelated items that the customer has a high chance of viewing and buying.
So it’s not so much of “search is bad” but “search is suggesting unrelated, but potentially interesting items” which leads to more sales.
Also this is why the item descriptions are such pain in the ass, to show them in as many searches as possible - sellers gaming the system.
The whole platform is designed to sell you as much shit as possible, usually on top of the item you actually wanted. This way you order your shit happily with some extra items in the cart
Amazon could make such a dramatic improvement by adding a simple “this item is not appropriate for this search” clickbox.
That way the users could force the sellers to correctly list their products or to face downranking in the search results.
Most search engines suck in that regard because they eschew exclusionary results in favor of delivering a decent amount of results, even if the prompt is specifically intended to be exclusionary in nature. Even google, you can wrap three distinct words in quotes or put + in front of them or whatever, and Google will still give you results with more common spellings of those distinct words and deliver results that omit 1 or more of those words, despite you very clearly wanting those 3 exact words all in one result.
Shopping for specific things like that, I tend to use a relevant retailer with robust filters. For example, light bulbs, I go to Home Depot, add those requirements via filter (click the box for correct base, correct size, color temperature, wattage/lumens), comparison shop the results, find a couple I want, and search the actual part number in google to find the best retailer. Seems tedious but actually cuts down on time as I’m not wading through irrelevant results (which often outnumber relevant results 10 to 1 when using a text prompt as opposed to filters)
I have found that for certain things like this, if you can find a part number it’s better to use that to get more refined results. It definitely won’t help for everything (clothing, groceries, etc). But it does help for tech things especially.
I mean, you’re not wrong, but it seems like a shopping website that refuses to show you the thing that you are looking for doesn’t want your business.
Amazon is incredibly bad about this. If I did not have to use it for work, I would not use it at all. I deactivated my prime account 5 years ago and I have not regretted it one second.
Now though, eBay is doing the same thing and that really sucks. AliExpress also does this. It’s getting to the point where you simply cannot find what you are looking for unless you are so specific that whatever search algorithm they are using simply cannot choose to show you something else about directly explicitly lying to your face.
And I don’t think that using a third party search engine to find the specific part number of the item you’re looking for so that you can find it on the shopping website that makes its money by selling you the things that you want to buy is a good solution.
Oh, this wasn’t me saying they don’t suck and aren’t actively getting worse. I just default to trying to be helpful.
I agree with you. Search in general is actively getting worse and worse.
