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- Hacker News
- It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up.
I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown).
Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop-shipped Chinese knockoffs now. The onsite search is almost entirely useless.
by geerlingguy - Aliexpress is also surprisingly impossible to search, you gotta use external search engines, I guess it increases there sales :S More than half the time for me on AliExpress a very specific search term will just return completely unrelated things which are either trending or related to my past purchases.by radicality
- Enshittification is such a perfect word for all this. Cory Doctorow is a word magician.by abixb
- I don't love (but use...) Amazon but I think if done properly, ads can be relevant even when searching for a specific thing.
Let's use a Google Example: I search for Toyota RAV4 and get an ad for Mazda cx-50. Obviously Toyota hates that but as a consumer it has a chance of making me aware of something I didn't know but would want to know, especially as a part of a purchase decision. That's why Mazda pays for that ad slot, and also why Toyota makes it expensive for them :)
Obviously google in this scenario comes out ahead and it is annoying for some users but can be highly valuable if done well.
It's not how I search or shop but plenty of people do.
by xyzelement - You search for Toyota RAV4, and you get an ad for whoever paid Google the most money to fingerprint your profile and bias your purchase decision. Since when did we start trusting everything we see on the Internet?by esalman
- This is the most baffling comment I think I’ve ever readby yunwal
- In any retail webstore, or even on Spotify, YouTube, etc. all the searches are infuriating today.
If I search for specific terms then I get a menu of slop to choose from. Search isn't built to serve the searcher at all. Search is meant to surface things that are promoted, hyped, advertised, or paid for in some way.
So you search Amazon for stuff and a lot of crap added on to it. Any retail site's filters are useless for filtering out what you don't want to see or casting a net for desirable features. I swear--search for "bananas" at a grocery store and you'll get results for ice cream and baby food and Minions merchandise and organic pears?
This behavior has already crept into LLM responses. I often request that they compile a list of the top-5 or top-10 according to some criteria. And it never fails that they cannot resist giving me outliers and things that don't fit by any means. Now I don't know what influences an LLM to give stupid non-matching results, but I know they do. Is RLHF already baking-in advertising and sponsorship? I wouldn't rule it out.
Case in point: the other day I was thinking of Amy Schumer but couldn't remember her name. So I struck up a convo with Copilot, and described Schumer by profession, personality, and physical attributes. Copilot first suggested a slender Black woman. Then Diablo Cody. And eventually compiled me a list of 5-7 people who were nothing like Amy Schumer. Never once even thought to mention her. Once I surfaced her name by other means, I went back and scolded Copilot, just so I could feel smug and better about myself. But it's genuinely surreal.
- Do you work in ads? In what world is this true?
Maybe if I searched “rav4 vs”
Cynically, this seems like the blargh Google says about how ads make our lives better. I think that’s BS and think ads are noise I have to push through to do whatever I’m trying to do.
by prepend - That’s pay to spam. Letting advertisers determine relevance of their product to a keyword is not exactly a user enhancing experience. When searching for rav4, i give you the ad for taylor swift concert, obviously understanding you can pay for it. This is spamming. “Relevant” ads should be determined by content producersby nashashmi
- No. If I search "Toyota RAV4" what I mean is Toyota RAV4. If I meant Mazda CX-50 I would have typed "Mazda CX-50." If I wanted information about various mid-size SUVs, rather than one in particular, I'd have searched "midsize SUVs."
The number of times I have searched something, got back something I did not ask for, and found that helpful, rounds down to zero. It's actively destructive to the platforms that allow this kind of hijacking of search terms.
by ryukoposting - > Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.
There was study not too long ago that showed that 48% of Amazon's employees were paid so little that they were forced to depend on some form of public assistance to meet their basic needs. Not only would an extra 35k a year prevent amazon employees from needing foodstamps and housing assistance, but I'd be willing to bet that amazon would make back some of it in increased amazon purchases too. It'd be great if the government cracked down on corporations who use taxpayer money to subsidize their labor expenses
by autoexec - Force means "coercion or compulsion, especially w the use of threat or violence".
If "not paying someone x dollars" = force, then at this moment, I'm forcing 6 billion people to do something.
- Socialize the costs and privatize the profits is where all this regulatory capture has gotten us.by apercu
- I've long felt that there needs to be a bill passed to charge companies $x additional tax each year where $x is the amount of government assistance their employees required in order to meet food/housing minimum standards. One way or the other, the companies that are making the rest of us pay for their employees to survive need to be funding these programs.by kamarg
- The new (to me) Amazon Haul storefront is (to me) hilarious. I was stunned when I first saw it: https://www.amazon.com/haul/store
I didn't dig very deep to compare prices, but it appears to compete with Aliexpress/Taobao/Temu, with a larger marketplace fee (presumably justified by the "Amazon" brand recognition and customer capture?). Even after the absolute mess that Amazon made with their "Ships via Amazon" and "Ships from third party" schemes, this feels like a new low.
Paired with the article, it seems to me like the natural conclusion is that the company wants to move away from distribution and towards pure rent-seeking, in the most blatant ways possible, trying to squeeze as much cash as possible from their name while it has any value.
by zetanor - Wow. Amazon Haul looks like the latest way to speed run heavy metal poisoning.by time0ut
- > What does it mean that I'm the importer?
Hello! Another thing it means is that you are legally responsible for paying ... ta-dum ... TARIFFS!
- This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now.
Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed.
Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just purchase intent, the platform will choose what you'll buy.
Powerful algorithms, subliminal design - I feel like a lamb in a dark forest full of wolves when I search on amazon, netflix, prime video ..
There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.
I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999 - it would actually find the exact thing you were looking for ! You no longer had to sift through directories of links, you could just filter it..
We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now, since this is by design, not by lack of technical knowledge of how to make search work.
by delegate - Amazon and a lot of other big companies feel like the corporate embodiment of the "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers" line from Clerks. We are not valued customers whose business forms the foundation of their success. We are obstacles that sit between them and the money in our bank accounts. They'd prefer to cut us out of the equation entirely, but failing that, they will do whatever it takes to overcome. The fact that they don't actually want us in the equation oozes through every bit of the process.by wat10000
- > We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now
a lot is worse now, but not shopping. on amazon some very specific items may be hard to find, and the search will throw a lot of crap at you, but you're still free to refine, compare and explore. finding exactly what you need and making an informed purchase has never been easier, and you get next day delivery (most of the time) plus exceptional return/refund policy and process. not sure about picking a, b or c? order all three, keep one, return the rest. i ofc don't (usually) do that, but i could. don't know how shopping could get any better/easier?
i don't like amazon as a company, it is evil and there is a lot to criticise, but the service and the value to the customer they provided has completely transformed shopping, for the better.
ofc long gone are the times where you could walk into a shop and talk to someone who actually had a clue about what they were selling and most likely was even an expert on the matter. that isn't coming back but that happened long before amazon.
by znort_ - To me its a bigger problem. The concept of Brand was highly diminished during the manufacturing outsource phase to cheap countries. You could pay $10 for the brand name of a simple product or get the 100% equivalent for $1 from a Chinese Knock off. So people felt ripped off and abandoned brands. (reasonable since the brands were keeping prices high artificially)
However that has lead to a massive drop off in quality and price/value ratio of all products. Now the brands and the knock offs are in a race to the bottom for the lowest quality product/profit ratio so there truly is no difference and no quality products below "luxury" tier exist anymore.
Even some high'ish tier brands shoes like Hoka/Ons shoes have major quality issues even though they exist at just below the "premium" price point. I had two pairs of the same Ons last year, one lasted 3 months and started falling apart the other pair is still going 1y later. I wore them roughly the same amount switching between them. I looked up online and it turns out both brands avoid long term production contracts to bank profits from the lowest bidder at expense of their own brand they built.
by citizenpaul - >>Somehow nobody noticed.
I disagree, many many people noticed and we were irked by it, but it's extremely impractical to fight against it.
by colinrand - Related: I've seen several local restaurants offering extremely good food come up and die simply because they could never get attention.
People only look at recommendations now, they don't look with their eyes anymore.
So now restaurants have to focus on growth hacking rather than food quality.
by qurren - This "dark forest" feeling is what has recently driven me back to brick-and-mortar stores. Of course they can and do manipulate me via ads, store layout etc. but at least the store looks the same for me as for the person before or after me. They can't algorithmically optimize the store around my behavior in particular.by muvlon
- The dark pattern I've noticed a few times is the exact match I type into Amazon search doesn't even return the item I entered but 2 or 3 entire pages of alternatives.
I know the item is there because Google returns it, either as a search response or in their "shopping" widget. I can click through Google to Amazon and see the item, sometimes even from the certified seller. But if I enter the exact search term in Amazon's search bar it doesn't show up in their own results.
- Searched for jeans a few days ago. I got about 3.3% each, scattered through several dozen pages, of two American brands; 1.65% each another couple of brands; a smattering of one or two results for another couple of brands; the remaining approximately 90% were the almost exact same jeans (maybe the same), under several names... pages and pages of them. It is almost impossible to shop for clothes on Amazon now. It used to be just selecting for 1 or 2 day delivery only would trim down the chaff, although now those products are also serviced through the warehouses (and there are less options for one day or same day delivery than years ago, Prime or not).
Some of the products aren't that bad (most are at least better than these sorts of results would spit out when it first started, years ago), but the prices are also at the same not-too-cheap, not pricey moderate price-point as the (of course I know many of those brands are not American but I know how they fit) known brands. Whoever is coding language parsing at Amazon.com must be really challenged by the brands; I get that; but there has to be a way to make it less stressful to shop. Maybe Bezos is just secretly trying to get us all to buy clothes where we don't buy food and books. Ha.
But yes, the language and sorting models being used by Amazon suck.
by jambalaya8 - >If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place).
What if I made a new air fryer that hasn't received a lot of reviews and costs a little more because of its quality? How would I break through, if not ads?
by Brendinooo - The point of this article is that, if Amazon doesnt want you do, then you wont.by superxpro12
- > How would I break through, if not ads?
Make YouTube videos. Food porn is a thing, and some subset of that crowd will want to watch you fry stuff with your "pro" fryer.
by topspin - I'm surprised there isn't a market for an amazon like competitor that is a mix of Amazon and Consumer Reports.
They do the reviews themselves, watch for returns and quality issues, and can actually provide consumers with the best products.
by jay_kyburz