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- Hacker News
- Good most product search results are thr cheapest crap i always sort by priceby psyclobe
- I started to use TUIs to do this. Have them track "tracked" products in a local storage mechanism and otherwise browse the web as normal through a controlled browser. It's not optimal but it's the only way to have some control over what it's doing.by hparadiz
- It's crazy how getting the best deals online is still a unsolved problem. Google product page was garbage even before AI, most aggregators are a complete farce as well, either displaying deals that are out of date or completely unrelated items, and let's not even get started with price tracking...
You'd think of all the companies, Google would be the best one to come up with a good solution for deal hunting but no...
I guess it's in no company's interest for consumers to get the best deals...
- > It's crazy how getting the best deals online is still a unsolved problem.
Not actually. Good deals are usually compensatation or a symptom of market forces. Additional costs in the form of marketing, advertising or risk aversion (bad or new vendors) are just some of the reasons that good deals exists.
by altcognito - It's worse.
It's in Google's interest to auction ad spots at the highest price.
That's it.
Nothing else matters. The content needs to be vaguely legal, the quality or any other product feature doesn't matter.
Another platform, Facebook, makes about 10% of its income from scams. No manager or executive will willingly reduce their company's income by 10%.
by oblio - I made pretty good experienes with some of these popular price watching websites in my region; for typical day to day stuff, they work great.
For special things, I look up the current pricing landscape anyway.
- For the UK, hotukdeals is pretty goodby anonreplier
- Started with a theory that it might be a possibility where google as a Ad business is trying to make money for their AI expenses from consumer. However after verifying the results for the items mentioned in the article plus some more and I DO NOT see any discrepancy in prices with either mode.
Dont want to call it clickbait right away, though its possible that it might be there before and Google fixed it OR the Author did not perform an apple to apple comparison, meaning its hard to verify if its same location and machine for both types of searches
by sandeepkd - I wonder when dynamic pricing based on the users chat history will be a thing. The users context based of LLM conversation should be way more detailed compared to traditional cookie tracking. Also buyers manipulation could be done at some point. Pretty scary to think aboutby lennart-rth
- this feels to be inevitable...by podgorniy
- dynamic/discriminatory pricing will be based on your chat history, your search history, your location, your purchase history, and every and any other data point that can be leveraged against you. Buying something near the birthday of a loved one? Expect prices to go up. Haven't driven in two days when you usually would have and now you're looking for a car part? Expect your prices to go up. Got a new job where you make more money? Expect your prices to go up.by autoexec
- That's really weird - I was trying to give my wife prices for a salad the other day, and it was showing 18.99 on the summary I was reading aloud (she was driving).
When we got to the restaurant she pointed out the salads were all 14.99 not 18.99. WTH? I'm assuming AI is showing some doordash price instead. We were driving there to pick it up in person.
- Finding the cheapest price for a product that isn’t fake is a completely unsolved problem and the entire premise of this is ridiculous
- AI mode doesn't even search. I'll ask it to find a blog post or article that I remember reading recently. It often just fails to find it. But when it does, it'll mention the title and say to just go to the link to it. But it never gives me the link. This is a literal response I got from AI mode (with titles swapped out):
> If you search the term "<POSSIBLE_ARTICLE_TITLE>" or "<POSSIBLE_ARTICLE_TITLE>" on Hacker News or Google, you will find the exact write-up and the massive threads of founders sharing matching horror stories.
Of course, there are no threads on HackerNews for that if you search it. My response was to just google for me, and it links me to a random novel that doesn't even match the titles suggested.
by bilalq - Hey, that's actually a pretty useful feature if it helps discourage people from buying so much stuff!by Sharlin
- The general implication is the opposite effect. The corporation wants to make more money. They make larger margins with this of course. But beyond that, the implication is that whatever sales are lost from the more expensive price are simply made up otherwise. If products are 20% more expensive but this only results in 10-15% less sales, the corporation is still very happy, particularly due to the margin bit. If loss impact is worse, they’ll usually retune how the product is ‘pitched’ in order to allow for this marginal boost.by danvayn
- At least in a few examples it looks like it is surfacing the manufacturers page, and then random 3rd parties have it cheaper, which is pretty commmon.by WarmWash
- I think it's a good thing if this forces manufacturers to list honest prices instead of inflated ones.by qurren
- Then again, that makes it more expensive for the inconspicuous buyer who has no idea, which is a considerably larger population than HN readers.by consp
- Yeah and I know one issue with this is that sites like Amazon tend to have greater protections against scraping from AIs, so there is not much AI providers could do if they wanted to find the true lowest price.
- Yes, I feel this is like when I look for a hotel and see a low price through a sketchy website but it is because it is a non-refundable member-only price. I wonder what the actual click through prices are. Sellers might try to serve higher prices to AI models but I'm not sure that would be useful to them.by ellisv
- I tried “mens cycling helmet specialized” via normal search and AI search.
On the surface, AI showed results of £45 while normal results showed £39.99 and this particular result didn’t show at all in the AI search, even when clicking more.
However, small fine print was the £39.99 had a £4.99 delivery. Can it be that AI is optimised for full price including shipping?
by Oras - Also, not defending AI, but id gladly install a ublockoriginAI to filter out scam products and low quality knock offs. Would never trust google to do this.
In your example, any helmet by a manufacturer who has zero safety tests, regulatory stamps, warranty, etc, should be filtered out.
Any product with anomalous price needs heavy scrutiny.
by cyanydeez - They’re using “traditional search” to mean the shopping specific search widget or page, which is a separate feature from traditional search. It aggregates retailer listings and sorts them by price.
The AI mode is based on normal top search results, which are oriented toward information about the product like the manufacturer’s page, which is usually going to be full MSRP.
So technically correct that the AI mode is not using the price ranking from the separate shopping mode, but the intent of the AI mode is to find information about the search term first and prices second. The intent of shopping mode is to find lowest prices first and not find any information about the product at all.
In my experience, shopping mode will show a lot of low prices that I can’t actually get because when I get to checkout shipping is $10 higher than anywhere else for some inexplicable reason, or the Google listing was tricked into showing a coupon code that doesn’t work with some exclusion message at checkout. The worst are the sites that show Googlebot a lower price on the indexing pass but then charge regular customers full price when you get there.
In some product areas these tricks are so widespread that every vendor uses them. Search for contact lenses at the lowest price and every single website will have a low price indexed by Google but will add a checkout fee to bring the price back up to full at checkout to cancel out the discount.
I haven’t found shopping mode to actually save me any money other than in a few rare cases. Usually it just wastes my time.
by Aurornis - Maybe not the same thing you’re seeing, but hiding the margin in shipping fees is a common and time-honored technique on e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay. Find any regular product, sort by price lowest-to-highest, and witness the number of very cheap items that look like an amazing deal… until you see the shipping charges. At which point it is as or often more expensive than the higher priced items + shipping.
It must be working on some unsuspecting shoppers because those listings are all over the place. There seems to be no policy against them either, and of course those items are never eligible for Prime shipping. To its credit, at least Amazon these days shows you the shipping costs on the product page itself, as opposed to finding out at checkout.
by keeda - It's not a trick. What you receive as shipping or taxes on google shopping are not the final ones, google doesn't have your full address, neither doesn't have info from the merchant for all taxes (depends on the country) and shipping applied to the product to all possible locations.by base