Does anyone else go looking on amazon because they used to have loads of stuff, but now there’s just a few things over and over and over and they’re not quite what you wanted. It’s so full of promoted content and you keep thinking that somewhere on one of the pages there might be something new, but no, it’s these same products again and again.
Amazon: You want to search for laptops with Graphics cards? Want to filter by RTX 3000s, 2000s, or 1600s?
Me: What about RTX 4000s?
Amazon: “What is a RTX 4000?”
They do it on purpose. Makes you stay longer, increasing chances of extra sales
So annoying.
Tbh, I find it a little more than mildly infuriating. Verging on very infuriating.
I found what I wanted on ebay, where the same item only appeared more than once if more than one seller was selling it. Amazon repeats the same stuff over and over and over and over.
Ebay sucks though too, they’ll steal your money. I will only use them as a last resort as well. I try to go directly to the manufacturer’s site to get around these big ones.
God forbid you want to use search exclusion.
Oh, you searched for “some item -plastic”, guess that means you want all these bestselling plastic ones.
I have literally used their own filter system to find something with very specific specs and it still shows me totally unrelated bullshit because just like SEO, shady sellers will just put an entire fucking dictionary in the description or tags so it always shows up no matter what you’re searching for.
Amazon: the world’s largest enshittification platform!
And sometimes the filters are completely irrelevant. You’re searching for correction fluid and the filters say 1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb-512Gb, 520Mb.
I use google. All it does is shove products at you anymore, so you might as well take advantage of that and use the search function that works far better than Amazon’s. All the Amazon sold products will show up in the google search anyway. Unfortunately, google’s modifiers are essentially worthless (like if you put -“amazon.com” or whatever to avoid amazon items) so it’s pretty hard to filter stuff, but at least Google casts a wider net so you might find better products or deals. Amazon does not always have the better price.
If you see a particular item in the google search that is what you’re looking for you can plug that specific brand and item name in amazon’s search and see if they even carry it. Sometimes they don’t, but that will help skip past Amazon’s shitty algorithm that forces items they want you to buy like made-for-Amazon crap vs what might actually be a better product.
Order it right from the widget maker directly if you can and skip amazon.
I’ve custom tailored my Amazon experience using my adblocker to delete pretty much any element that doesn’t serve me.
This includes any and all ads, “recommended” items, “customers also bought…” listings, banners for their business account, and anything that isn’t specifically relevant to the item I’m looking at.
I can’t image using it vanilla. They’d lose my business.
Yeah I’ve been doing that for years on every site I use frequently (so far that I even got my own YouTube filter list on github). It doesn’t help with broken searches ignoring operators, but it makes the web a much better place nonetheless!
Oh wow, that sounds fantastic. What adblocker is that, and how do you configure it?
I’m using Adguard, but most will have element blocking as a feature.
Basically, I select “block ads on this website”, and I click on the element. A small box comes up where I can fine tune the selected element (I usually do this to get cleaner results), then I preview and confirm the setting.
I’m able to then take that filter, and use it pretty much anywhere else that I use adguard (Android phone, another computer, etc.). It’s awesome.
But like I said, most adblockers will have this feature, including the popular ublock origin. It might just be under a different name.
You can do this for any website :)
Thank you very much indeed, knowledgeable internet stranger.
Is this all on a desktop/laptop computer? I’m on my phone 95% of the time but I see a lot of conversations on Lemmy about how to block ads or work around YouTube’s restrictions (or whatever) and they make it seem like people are on a desktop full time. I guess it’s just a little surprising to me if that’s the case.
As long as you can run the adguard browser extension in a mobile browser, then you can add new elements to block.
But if that’s not an option, you can create those rules on a desktop browser, then add them to Adguard on mobile (the app, not the browser extension).
As long as you have the rules in a filter list, it’ll work anywhere. These amazon specific sanitation rules may already be available on public adblocking lists, and in that case, they could work regardless of the adblocking app being used.
UBlock Origin works on Firefox Mobile for Android the same as on Desktop. It’s only Apple users who eat shit.
Yeah it’s pretty trash, and I’ve found that if I buy direct from the manufacturer website for 99% of stuff I’ll actually save $5-10, including shipping
In Germany, and by extension the EU, we have a website called “geizhals”, which basically translates to “penny-pincher”.
It is an insanly good tool to find the specific item you’re looking for and where to buy it for the least amount of money. Its got a pretty robust search, and some of the most comprehensive filters I’ve ever seen. When I cant find what I’m looking for using Amazons search, which is nearly always, I use their site instead.
Only real downside (for me) is when stuff isn’t listed on there. They probably collect data and stuff, but they also provide a useful service in return.
While writing this I have also noticed that they offer the same thing called “skintflint” for the UK. Maybe something similar exists for ppl. in the U.S. ?
we need anti-enshitification extensions and apps for amazon and ebay, the former is even worse
It might just be the things I go on ebay for but they’ve really cleaned up their site in the past ~10 years. I remember when searching for literally anything would give you results like OP’s pic but I haven’t seen that in years. I think i do like 80% of my online shopping there nowadays
Today I gave up on amazon and found the item I wanted on ebay, which was much easier to browse because it showed me each product from each seller roughly once. It was so much easier. I saw the same stuff as I saw on amazon but about 80 other products too. Amazon used to be the ones with the product range, and that’s how they got big. Now they’ve enshitified quite thoroughly.
the former is even worse
Amazon is worse than Amazon?
What annoys me about Amazon search is it doesn’t listen to my search, and it doesn’t allow qualifiers such as minus sign. Most other searches listen to minus sign as excluding that word from search.
Example: metal cup -plastic -mug -jug
I search for a metal cup, but I do not want plastic, and not a mug or jug.
Yeah, their plan is: deduce what kind of thing they want, broaden it to include more sponsored products, list as many as possible to boost ad revenue, try as hard as possible to get them to cave and buy a sponsored product so we can make more money from ad revenue. Sucks as a customer. Probably sucks as a supplier, it’s the standard monopoly enshitified money extraction maximiser.
But also the dont want product you, the your product want dont, and the super dont want you product for (8 pack)
All of which are low on stock.
can’t say I’ve experienced this exactly but I feel ya in spirit o7
The product you actually want:
-
Out of Stock -
-
Doesn’t qualify for Prime Shipping -
-
Doesn’t have the best Shipping/Price options -
-
Unavailable -
-
“We do not know when this item will be restocked!” -
-
Haha, I thought this was a comment on AWS at first. Where everything service is just EC2s and S3 buckets in a trench coat that all do something slightly different than another service they offer.
I spent a few days ago hunting for a EC2 service that I was being charged for. The AWS budget said it came from “EC2 Services” which yeah, could mean anything.
Started by typing EC2 then clicking every single tab to find what was turned on. I finally found the service because there was a region filter, that let me find out that I was using a EBS that I left activated when I was goofing around in another region.
Yeah, the only thing more confusing than figuring out what service best fits your need is figuring out how it’s billed.
Some services will spin up eight other things and all will look like separate things from a billing perspective, if you aren’t careful with tagging/managing things.
Which, let’s be clear, is not an inherently bad thing. Most sane people don’t want to reinvent the wheel. If you have a foundation that works and can easily be built off of in a reusable way the. You ultimately end up saving a lot of time and money.
Now, going back to your dig, it is true that Amazon has too many similar services, a lot of which could have just been an offering under an existing service. If you offer a certification just for memorizing what all of your services do then you may have gone too far.
Yeah, I always hated that the foundational cert (or whatever it’s called) is basically just “what service is this”. The worst is that at the rate things change the info doesn’t stay relevant for long.
Sagemaker has literally gone through tens of iterations at this point. Hard to keep straight what it does and doesn’t offer.
Member when Bezos wanted to solve product reviews to make their search work better? Some time ago, Amazon just gave up and surrendered to the hellscape it has become.
Someone wrote the code that puts the same listing four times per page.
i first shopped on amazon way back when it was still mostly books. they were just starting to bring in other stuff.
their web site and ui has always been shit.
