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Comment on Shopping website search is terrible

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 and between each word. We had one site that allowed it, just use lucene search syntax.

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AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It turns out many of us do search for specific terms when we want specific items.

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- Carighan@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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
    
    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
    
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  - Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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    Carighan@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Oh I don’t disagree. When I worked in this stuff we usually snuck in that if you put in valid search query syntax (I think it was all Lucene based) then it got used as is. Was nice for us devs to debug shit.
    
    Of course, anything else for used for a weighted fuzzy everything search, and the customers were always take happy with that (customers being the store owners). 🤷
    
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