Comment on Shopping website search is terrible

• 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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