Submitted 1 month ago by ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
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?
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.
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
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.
Many shopping sites are based on woocommerce, which is an ugly hack transforming a blogging platform in a store.
Like if you take a school and made it a supermarket with all the goods scattered on the desks in the classrooms.
Sucks at performance and sucks at search.
Carighan@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.AA5B@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It turns out many of us do search for specific terms when we want specific items.
Carighan@lemmy.world 1 month 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.