[HN Gopher] Home Depot Finds DIY Success with Vector Search
___________________________________________________________________
Home Depot Finds DIY Success with Vector Search
Author : gk1
Score : 124 points
Date : 2022-03-16 12:46 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.datanami.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.datanami.com)
| mhb wrote:
| FTA: _Instead of powering the search by attempting a direct one-
| to-one matching of keywords, a vector search engine attempts to
| match the input term to a vector, which is an array of features
| generated from objects in the catalog._
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Nice to see Huiming Qu getting a mention.
|
| Home Depot seemed to have a tradition of good, practical
| engineering when I was there. Emphasis on solving the problem
| incrementally and reliably, rather than trying to boil the ocean.
|
| (Disclaimer: Former employee)
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| I really appreciated the insight into the KPI's they are using
| to measure the impact of Intent Search:
|
| * counted cumulative gain - a measure of ranking quality *
| query reformulations - a measure of search friction *
| complaints about search relevance * engagement with top search
| results
|
| It's great to be able to define concrete KPIs that have an
| objective impact on user experience.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| As a long-time Home Depot customer who works on everything DIY
| (cars/gardens/home improvements/etc) I have found over the past
| few years that Home Depot search will consistently get me to
| the product that I am looking to buy or close enough that it is
| easy to comb through the results to refine the search.
|
| This is in stark contrast with Lowe's where I would describe
| the difference as being akin to searching via Google (Home
| Depot) or by Cuil (Lowe's).
|
| For those unfamiliar with Cuil:
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/cuil-theory
|
| If you know her please send some high praise from me. I am one
| of the people who has long experience with making things and
| knows several ways to describe common tools, materials, parts,
| etc but who hates to have to cycle through each of them hoping
| that the inventory management engine recognizes the product and
| lists it near the top when it delivers search results.
|
| As a customer, I could tell that results from Home Depot
| searches delivered quality results by a simple search for a 2x4
| of a specific length.
|
| Excellent work!
| twothamendment wrote:
| After building 3 houses, some of them doing all electrical,
| windows, doors, trim, flooring, paint and endless projects -
| I too have been impressed with the search results.
|
| Lowe's, on the other hand blows HD away with speed. HD could
| also work on their funky layout issues. On an up to date
| mobile chrome, sometimes it decides that I'm really on a
| desktop (no, I didn't hit desktop mode) and it renders what
| is nearly useless on a small screen.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| >On an up to date mobile chrome, sometimes it decides that
| I'm really on a desktop (no, I didn't hit desktop mode) and
| it renders what is nearly useless on a small screen.
|
| Thanks for reminding me of this. I'm still using a Windows
| phone. It will be obsoleted soon though, and I had blamed
| most of the poor rendering of HD site on a phone on the
| phone itself since I commonly get the "unsupported browser
| - please upgrade" messages from lots of sites.
|
| Like Best Buy, their mobile version is not good and borders
| on unusable. I had always blamed that on my own decision to
| use an obsolete phone as long as possible instead of on
| poor mobile website performance. I tend to locate the part
| that I need on my desktop, send a link or screenshot to my
| phone. That way I know which aisle/bin to find it once I
| make it to the store and don't have to waste time exploring
| all the things that I want but don't need.
|
| Lowe's does throw up search results a bit faster but to me,
| the time wasted trying to find the right combination of
| terms to use in searching is not worth the small price
| difference between the two stores. I buy from Lowe's when I
| am looking for a specific brand that is not carried at Home
| Depot.
| nomel wrote:
| I also prefer Home Depot search, but having something labeled
| as "in store", driving there, and finding that it doesn't
| exist (appliances are especially bad) is _infuriating_. I 'm
| basically right between two Home Depot and one Lowes. With
| Home Depot, I almost always have to go to both, and usually
| end up saying "f*ck it" and then go to Lowes and pay a couple
| dollars more. I now just go straight to Lowes because my time
| is worth more than a few dollars in savings. My wife also
| refuses to go to Home Depot for anything, from her own
| experiences, saying they never have anything in stock.
| bradly wrote:
| I'm building a tool to measure, track, and improve search and AI
| models. If you'd like to beta test, please reach out!
| dncornholio wrote:
| https://www.homedepot.com/ is showing a 403 forbidden page to me
| since GDPR hit. Such a spit in face left bad taste in my mouth.
| Not even a page that explains why, just the standard 403 page..
| bombledmonk wrote:
| While I appreciate the sentiment of the topic of fuzziness and
| AI, this also breaks search for people who are looking for
| precision. For people who are used to a McMaster-Carr or Digi-Key
| style search where precision matters in results, the fuzziness
| introduces ambiguity and hampers repeatability. These are both
| very important when designing products. Amazon, Home Depot, and
| Lowes are a bear when trying to find something with very specific
| specifications, it's quite literally rage inducing to add a more
| specific keyword to q query and get more (wrong) results in the
| output.
| zucked wrote:
| Home Depot does some things right and some things so poorly I
| wonder if it's intentional.
|
| Here's one I ran into just yesterday. I wanted to know the
| ballpark cost of a belt-driven garage door opener. So I google
| "home depot belt drive garage door opener". Landed on this page:
| https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Opener...
|
| So... where's the garage door openers? I know you carry them. No
| amount of modification of the search options surfaces any belt-
| driven garage door openers. Thinking I was crazy, I went up a
| category to "Garage Door Openers" and clicked the "Belt Drive"
| category at the top. Same result.
|
| WTH?
|
| I will say that the accurate listing of item location in the
| store has saved me hours and hours of wandering and even if I
| can't find the specific item I'm looking for (see above) I can
| look up generic garage door openers and find what aisle it's
| likely to be in.
| fckgw wrote:
| That sounds more like Google sending you to the wrong page on
| Home Depot's site, no? If you punch in "belt drive garage door
| opener" on the actual Home Depot website it returns the results
| you want.
| zucked wrote:
| It's a borked landing page, I suspect. Go up a product level:
| https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-
| Opener...
|
| Click on "Belt Drive" among the Opener Types. Same result.
| Not terribly related to the topic at hand, but its definitely
| a gripe I have the the HD website sometimes works great and
| sometimes is terribly unhelpful.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Doesn't work: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-
| Door-Opener...
|
| Works: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-
| Opener...
|
| Also Works: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Does-Not-Matter/Does-
| Not-Matter/...
|
| The "seo" part of the url doesn't actually matter. Where they
| went wrong is not redirecting a page that has no results to a
| one that does when SEO text matches.
| [deleted]
| abanayev wrote:
| This is why Semantle is better than Wordle
| interestica wrote:
| > Home Depot has a list of IT projects that it wants to tackle
|
| I'm outside of Canada. Trying to go to homedepot.ca just gives me
| an 'Access Denied". I legitimately want to purchase things to
| send to people back home and cannot. There's not even some sort
| of graceful fallback. I don't understand the logic and wonder if
| it's just an honest IT routing mistake.
| ffhhj wrote:
| That's interesting. A few months ago my father's credit card
| was charged by Home Depot in Canada, and we don't live in that
| country. It was certainly fraud, and the payment was reverted.
| Maybe their systems are compromised and that's the reason to
| deny foreign access?
| alexfromapex wrote:
| I think a lot of companies are going this direction now with
| search, what are you all finding are the best language models?
| huffmsa wrote:
| I bought a house in the past year and have become a regular at
| Home Depot. Now that I'm aware, I have noticed that I've had very
| little issue with their online search. And the site tells me
| exactly the aisle and bay # to get it
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Example of common sense HD decision: "Wait, why are we
| developing an app for our associates to locate items, when we
| could also just expose that to the customer themselves?"
| thirdtrigger wrote:
| Super cool article, we work on OSS vector search technology
| (Weaviate) as well and I can confirm that we see many similar use
| cases especially with multi-model models and rerankers.
| binarymax wrote:
| If you're into this kind of thing check out the #vectors-in-
| search channel at https://opensourceconnections.com/slack -- Us
| vector search nerds hang out there (and some of the Home Depot
| search nerds too) and share insights and ideas.
| raghavbali wrote:
| vector search is everywhere nowadays. Glad to see another success
| story. Kudos to the team
| owenfi wrote:
| Now I just wish they would fix the search field so it would
| actually submit when I press return on my iPhone.
| sockaddr wrote:
| Lowes needs something similar. Their search is worse than
| useless. It commonly doesn't return relevant results that can be
| found by searching completely irrelevant terms. It's bizarre.
| charliejuggler wrote:
| If you're interested in the detail behind this check out Simon
| Hughes' talk at our Haystack search relevance conference last
| year https://haystackconf.com/2021/ - the video is here
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWc4DOM-CHk . Haystack US 2022 is
| open for business (and talk submissions) too at
| www.haystackconf.com if you're into search!
| adnmcq999 wrote:
| I'm a sales associate at Home Depot - I have to look up items all
| the time. I usually just google "item Home Depot"
|
| This usually gets me the item or a similar item. If the item is
| similar and not what they want, I have a tree categorization and
| I can usually go up a level. The interesting problem w the Home
| Depot I think is figuring out how to categorize and when to make
| a category. For example "screws" is an obvious category in which
| there will be sub-categories and parameters on which to filter
| like "length" or "color" (I use this a lot). What filter
| parameters to have is also interesting as is how to display the
| results. Most items are returned in a list form but, annoyingly,
| some types of items have their own splash page that is kind of
| unique to that item.
|
| If the item is weird, it might be really hard to categorize,
| usually these go into _____ accessories. Overall I think Home
| Depot does a good job w the search except the UI is laggy as
| someone mentioned and as they also mentioned the location setting
| is ALWAYS WRONG. FIX THIS NOW! Every. Single. Time I have to
| check if an item is in stock at my store, it puts me in the wrong
| store and I have to manually change it myself. Am I just a moron
| or is there really no way to set it and forget it?
| bagels wrote:
| The store location selector forgets all the time which you had
| selected last. What's best is it appears to try to infer
| location from ip address, so when you are in a home Depot on a
| mobile, it picks a different store from the one you are
| standing in.
| paulmd wrote:
| I think a lot of stores incorporate a "cheater" mechanism
| where if you're on the store wifi they use that as the
| location. You could pick it up via IP or hardware MAC (even
| if you are on a VPN the local router still knows your MAC
| from when you passed the ToS accept portal).
|
| Doesn't help cell service of course, and cellular data
| clients are REALLY tricky to geolocate properly. Cell towers
| are often trunked a considerable distance (apparently?) so
| your IP can indicate you're quite far from your physical
| location.
|
| Pages really rely on the browser to cue location in that
| scenario, but of course many of us turn it off, and at that
| point you get what you get.
| adnmcq999 wrote:
| Our HD can't get their internet to work, so we have to use
| our own data to look shit up. Idk how cellular data works but
| I'm usually some store in Chicago (despite being in Madison),
| it seems to vary depending on where I am in the store, though
| I may be making connections that aren't there.
| paulmd wrote:
| You would probably find it interesting to take a look at
| McMaster-Carr's website for an example of the hardware-store UX
| done right.
|
| They do the categorization thing really well, there's "catalog
| pages" that reference item categories, and item categories can
| be attached to multiple different catalog pages, and items are
| categorized by tons of different metrics (length, diameter,
| thread pitch, head shape, material, color...).
|
| And while that's a pretty generic statement - there's lots of
| stores that let you filter by material or color, after all -
| it's all executed SUPER well. I often use it just to get a
| broad idea of what hardware actually exists/what the
| terminology I need to search for elsewhere.
|
| https://www.mcmaster.com
|
| I knew someone who worked on their system and apparently it's
| all COBOL on the backend too lol. I'm sure there's some modern
| tech on the frontend but I bet all the inventory stuff/etc and
| the warehouse terminals are running on COBOL.
| ketzo wrote:
| I have never worked even _close_ to any kind of industrial
| procurement, and I still know about McMaster-Carr, just
| because of how much people love using their website.
|
| That's some good UX right there.
| ebrewste wrote:
| I agree that their website is great. For the olds like me,
| we had just as big a love affair with their printed catalog
| before the website. Their shipping was on a different plane
| also, long before e-commerce changed the shipping game.
| They have always taken UX seriously. I had an engineering
| internship where the president had a saying: "If you can't
| design a machine from the McMaster-Carr catalog, you aren't
| an engineer."
| mirntyfirty wrote:
| Not only the website is perfect, I'd say the same about
| delivery and customer service.
| paulmd wrote:
| I'm sure it's a massive boost to their bottom line too.
| Once you get people on the site, and once they start
| putting together their order, odds are good they're not
| going to go elsewhere. The UX literally makes the sale for
| them.
|
| (of course not every shopping cart converts to an order,
| and people still order things you don't have elsewhere,
| etc. But getting people on the site and engaged is half the
| battle, assuming you don't give them a reason to shop
| elsewhere.)
| zikduruqe wrote:
| How about rockauto.com?
|
| I mean, I can drill down to exactly what I need easily.
| nablag wrote:
| Can confirm as an ex-mcmaster-carr software developer that
| they put a lot of effort into their websites UI/UX
| [deleted]
| bze12 wrote:
| This. I recently wrote something about why I love
| McMaster.com so much
|
| https://www.bedelstein.com/post/mcmaster-carr
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| Uhh on McMaster I think I need a flow meter with range around
| 0.3 L/min since I'm designing something new and not
| replacing, and there are separate check boxes for 0.25-0.5,
| 0.2-1, 0.1-0.6, ... etc. with 3 different units mixed in.
|
| If you know exactly what you need, then yes. But if you're
| messing around on home depot needing like a 3 7/8 "ish" screw
| but-maybe-a-4-will-do the McMaster system would stink.
| mattkrause wrote:
| I would be surprised (but not totally amazed) if they had
| fixed it in the hour since your comment was posted but...
|
| I now see separate selectors for maximum flow, minimum
| flow, and graduations here:
| https://www.mcmaster.com/flowmeters/
| paulmd wrote:
| While true, this is unfortunately not unique, I see the
| same issue on (eg) Mouser/Digikey/Arrow for electronics
| parts.
|
| Obviously in some cases it can be replaced by a range
| slider, but there's also cases where it really can't. In
| some cases it's the _part itself_ that has the range - like
| let 's say a pump is designed to produce a flow rate of
| 0.5-5 gal/min, you _can 't_ express that with the usual
| range slider.
|
| I guess what you really need is an "inverse range slider"
| where instead of saying "I want a connector that carries at
| least 5 amps but not more than 15" you say "my project
| needs a flow rate of 2.5 gpm, _what parts have that value
| within their range_ ".
|
| But I mean... compare the McMaster-Carr site to Home Depot,
| or Target, or whatever, and it's just a breath of fresh
| air. Like, if inverse-ranges are the biggest thing you can
| complain about, mission accomplished ;)
| pinot wrote:
| Flow meters need an operations range though. So any of
| those ranges would work for your application.
|
| But trying to find a screw on Home Depot or Fastenal .. ugh
| ellyagg wrote:
| I talk to random people outside of tech who love that site
| too. I did a bit of googling to get any details on how it
| came about and came up with this:
|
| https://www.quora.com/Who-designed-UI-UX-and-developed-
| the-w...
|
| It was heavily influenced by Tufte!
| mywittyname wrote:
| I think they achieved mainstream notoriety due to
| Mythbusters.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I learned about them through word-of-mouth through
| various "maker" types of people.
| [deleted]
| cptskippy wrote:
| I hate this shit. I hate when companies try to optimize their
| results to what they think I want. I don't care if it's Home
| Depot or Amazon, nothing infuriates me more than searching for
| something I know exists and getting contextualized results that
| are not what I asked for. If you're going to do this, at the very
| least allow me to turn it off so I can see what I'm missing.
|
| I wanted to see if HD had a outdoor jbox extension ring in stock
| before I drove down there, so what did I search for? Well
| "outdoor jbox extension ring" of course. What did I get results
| for? A sprinkler spike, various types of romex, a Wyze flood
| light, and extension cord protectors.
|
| I guess at least now I know why their search is useless.
|
| * What would be helpful is knowing which terms, if any, didn't
| get hits. Maybe it was jbox and I need to type "junction box",
| idk. But providing me garbage results is just infuriating.
| coding123 wrote:
| If anyone from Home Depot is there:
|
| I normally search for T&G Plywood and I get what I expect.
|
| Right now that search is broken at the & and it thinks my entire
| search string is just "T". Instead I have to enter "T&G
| Plywood" into the search - literally adding the html entity and
| that actually works correctly for the search.
| simonhughes22 wrote:
| Thanks that is definitely broken. Logging the issue right now.
| coding123 wrote:
| :heart:
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| This sounds a lot like semantic web search? Can anyone share how
| it differs?
| sp332 wrote:
| The part at the beginning where employees manually loaded
| possible search terms sounds like the semantic web to me. This
| project uses deep learning to automatically direct a whole
| space of possible search terms to an item, instead of just
| missing all the terms that were not manually added.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'd guess that the primary difference is in the attribute space
| and specificity.
|
| Home Depot products are specific in odd ways. E.g. an 8' PVC
| pipe can be shortened on-site, a 3' downrod for a ceiling fan
| might not be able to. So substitutability is hard.
| karaterobot wrote:
| No expert here, but I assumed the difference was that the model
| created "hidden connections" that weren't explicitly added by
| curators.
|
| From what I remember, the Semantic Web was intended to be a big
| library science type of project, where people described things
| for computers, so that people could find them. This seems more
| like computers describing things so that people can find them,
| and then updating based on how people react.
|
| > Qu's vector search engine is able to discover hidden
| connections among products, such as sloped ceilings, ceiling
| fans, and downrods...
|
| And
|
| > Perhaps Home Depot knows that a particular customer is in the
| middle of a patio renovation, which instantly narrows the
| search down to outdoor ceiling fans.
|
| It's not clear to me why that part couldn't be done with
| conventional searches, but maybe it's something this
| technological makes it simpler to use. /shrug
| simonhughes22 wrote:
| I worked on the system. It's a similar idea but it's on
| e-commerce products and not websites. So you can't use things
| like page rank when doing product search.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| Well semantic web search is less about traditional web search
| and more about semantic relationships between terms using
| ontologies.
|
| If you search for "pipe A500", the search engine would
| deconstruct that. It would see pipes have steel, and a
| coating for steel, and a grade of steel. It would see A500 is
| a grade of steel. Pipes don't have a grade A500, but tubes
| do, and tubes have the other classifications that pipes do.
| It may then conclude that while 'A500' and 'pipe' are not
| linked directly, a different term may be very similar and a
| more direct match ('tube'), and thus return 'A500 tube'
| results.
|
| It seemed like the machine learning model was building
| relations between these different concepts and using them to
| improve the search, but without the intentional taxonomic
| mapping that semantic web uses. Semantic web is essentially
| more of a curated database of relationships, whereas the
| machine learning appears to be using another method to
| establish the relationships. I wonder if they're not doing
| basically the same thing.
| tbran wrote:
| I wish someone at Home Depot would fix come of their website's
| basic usability issues. The layout shifts, bad location UI, and
| slow speed really sour the experience.
|
| Interestingly, I recently did what I thought was a basic search
| for a 2'x4' piece of birch plywood and the results were pretty
| wonky. I ended up drilling down through menus instead.
|
| If you contrast this with McMaster Carr's website, you'll wonder
| what went wrong at HD. I've been ordering online from McMaster
| for probably close to two decades, and it's better in every way
| from speed to interface to product specs.
| mindslight wrote:
| If you install NoScript and then enable javascript on only the
| Home Depot domains (as opposed to the ~17 or so surveillance
| domains), the site works much better. No great, of course. But
| much better.
|
| FWIW McMaster and Digikey are themselves the exceptions. I've
| never seen a good parametric search engine anywhere else - they
| all compensate by leaning on product popularity (read:
| profitability), and you can never be sure it's actually
| surfaced all of the relevant results. I usually end up
| searching by one or two basic keywords, then linearly iterating
| through a few pages of results.
| tlpacker wrote:
| @tbran, curious what your initial search text was. Was it
| "2'x4' piece of birch plywood"? That returns relevant results
| in the top row for me, though I admit, it also returns two not-
| quite-relevant items in the first slots.
|
| Full disclosure: I work in THD Online Search.
| tbran wrote:
| I'm not quite sure what it was, it was maybe 3-4 weeks ago. I
| think part of the problem is that different searches return
| different results:
|
| "2x4 birch plywood" returns the correct results in the first
| two slots - 2'x4' birch plywood in 1/2" and 3/4".
|
| "2'x4' birch plywood" returns those two correct results above
| in the 3rd/4th positions as you noted. As a customer, this is
| a signal that I need to be real good at searching on HD's
| website and start thinking up clever permutations for my
| searches.
|
| Also, IIRC, at the time it also returned 2"x4" lumber either
| at or near the top of the results. Well, if I put "plywood"
| in the search string, I expect plywood, not results for every
| length of 2"x4" lumber that HD carries. I was pretty
| irritated at the time and I'm actually surprised that "2x4
| birch plywood" even appears in the top row of the results.
| mikeyschaefer wrote:
| I'm on my second home remodel and spend a lot of time at
| HomeDepot. I generally avoid searching via their website or app
| and just use either DDG/google with the "site:homedepot.com"
| search operator. I get way more reliable results that way.
|
| And at my local stores the available quantity shown on the
| website is rarely accurate. Fairly frustrating experience to
| show up when the app lists "20 in stock" and there isn't
| anything there.
| zucked wrote:
| >And at my local stores the available quantity shown on the
| website is rarely accurate. Fairly frustrating experience to
| show up when the app lists "20 in stock" and there isn't
| anything there.
|
| Seen the same and now I draw an arbitrary line - if they have
| less than 10, you're taking a chance - don't bet your project
| on it. If they have less than 5, you can almost guarantee
| they don't actually have it. If they have 10+, you can often
| find them, but they've not been unpacked or stocked on
| shelves yet. Usually an associate can locate them up high on
| the shelves and if you really need it and ask nice, they'll
| often get it down for you if they aren't otherwise busy*
|
| *I wouldn't expect this to work on a Saturday at 11AM,
| though.
| nomel wrote:
| I've stopped shopping at Home Depot and now always go to
| Lowe's, due to Home Depots inability to track and pack their
| own stock, in their app/website.
|
| There's no way to know if something actually exists in the
| store, before driving there. If you call, they look at the app
| and say yes. If you ask for help finding where the pile of "40
| in store, aisle 12, bay 15" is, they look at the app and say
| it's out of stock, where you can sometimes then go find it a
| few aisles away, but almost always not. I've wasted so many
| hours, with so much frustration walking around those damn
| aisles.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I ordered some items from them I couldn't find in my local
| stores. One of them was sent from a store but it was an older
| model different from the one I had ordered from the site. It
| turns out they reuse the same SKU when products are updated.
| Phone support refuses to provide customer service for
| anything delivered from a store so I had to go back and
| exchange it for the proper model. Except that the price had
| risen since I placed my order and the drone at the customer
| disservice desk insisted that I had to pay the difference. I
| had to argue with them to do what they were supposed to do
| with printouts from the web site showing their foolishness.
|
| Never use the Home Depot site to buy anything.
| wil421 wrote:
| I think the problem is the vendors loading different
| information into whatever platform they use. I've seen it at
| other retailers and customer support said the vendors load all
| the info, in my case she said they entered it wrong.
| c0nsumer wrote:
| Yes. Just try to use it on a slightly poor mobile signal, like
| when actually in a Home Depot store.
|
| I'm remodeling a house and I end up having to go to one of
| three HD stores that are each about five miles from the house.
| Each is in a slightly different area demographically and thus
| has a different selection of stuff, and each has a very
| different layout.
|
| Their listing of stock and aisle/bin makes it easy to find what
| I need, but the site is so awful on mobile that I'll often look
| things up at home on a full PC, write down locations, then go.
|
| On mobile I've seen the layout shift all over, the search break
| if I touch something or scroll after I submit a query, checking
| the "in stock items" box sometimes breaks my session. It's
| awful.
| simonhughes22 wrote:
| I'd suggest using the app over the mobile website. If you are
| in store, it will tell you where in the store the items are
| (Bay and Aisle) which is super useful.
| c0nsumer wrote:
| The site will do that too, without being an app installed
| on my device collecting... stuff? If only it'd work well.
|
| (I tend to eschew apps however much I can. But maybe I
| should just suck it up until this project is done.)
| qubitcoder wrote:
| The Home Depot mobile app is pretty nice. It's
| significantly easier and faster to use, especially while
| in a store. Along with the quick location
| toggles/searches, it's worth checking out.
| simonhughes22 wrote:
| The results here look fine to me in positions 3 and 4 -
| https://www.homedepot.com/s/2'x4'%2520piece%2520of%2520birch...
|
| What are you expecting to see? I worked on this search engine
| so interested to get feedback, good or bad (bad is actually
| more useful!).
| tbran wrote:
| Hopefully this does not sound snarky, but I expect to see
| 2'x4' birch plywood, in 1/2" and 3/4", in the first two
| slots!
|
| 4'x8' sheets are fine, but later in the results.
|
| 2"x4" lumber should not appear and is like showing me a
| toilet when I want a sink. Also see my reply below.
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| Well almost half the results on the page are 4x8's, when
| explicitly searching for 2x4's for one.
| simonhughes22 wrote:
| It does semantic matching. We don't have a lot of exact
| matches for that search for birch wood (given the exact
| dimensions) so the engine broadens the search criteria
| automatically. You never want to just show exact matches,
| so long as they are ranked near the top over fuzzier
| matches. People often assume the search is bad if they see
| a lot of broader matches, without realizing that there
| might not be many perfect matches for the exact query
| given.
| lazide wrote:
| Returning things that are fundamentally incompatible with
| the search (like different dimensions than being
| searched) is actually worse than useless, as it clutters
| up everything and makes me spend more mental time and
| effort seeing if you have something in stock.
|
| Which sucks.
|
| HD search has been basically useless to me in the past
| for this exact reason. If I'm searching for a 3/8 lag
| bolt, returning results for 1/4 and 1/2 lag bolts mixed
| in with random 3/8 lag bolts are literally worse than
| just showing me 1 lag bolt result.
| zigus wrote:
| I agree that it looks confusing, when you combine those
| two.
|
| What you can do is to show the best matches on top, and
| add other results, which are not an exact match, but
| visually separate them ("You might also like these..").
|
| That is how we usually do it. You can use this approach
| also when recommending visually similar products to the
| one you searched for.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| There's no indication it's doing this on purpose. It just
| looks broken and confusing. There also doesn't appear to
| be a way to tell it to only show exact matches. The
| obvious place would be the refinement sidebar, but
| dimensions are absent.
|
| edit: for comparison, have a look at B&H's search where
| you can get so specific that it only shows one result
|
| https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/products/laptops/ci/18818/
| N/4...
| Cyberdogs7 wrote:
| >You never want to just show exact matches
|
| I am not sure how well this holds up when searching a
| product catalog. I would believe it for a general purpose
| search engine, but for a product catalog, I am searching
| for a very specific thing.
|
| Qualifying keywords on a product catalog are likely more
| common. Compare the searches for "'2' x '4' birch
| plywood" vs "birch plywood" and you can see why exact
| matching can be prefered, as it's very easy for the user
| to generalize their search.
| nomel wrote:
| > It does semantic matching.
|
| Matching the semantics of "it's wood and it's for
| building and it has a 2 in it" isn't very useful when you
| have something that's absolutely _not semantic_ , like a
| specific size definition that's an industry standard, and
| not really interchangeable.
|
| It's like searching for a 3/4" socket and getting a list
| of 1/4", because there's a four in each. It's not
| helpful. It's completely useless and makes the search
| results look incompetent. Put those in "related
| searches", with a divider or different background color,
| or something to separate the "right" from "obviously
| wrong".
|
| The search experience for wood and sockets should be
| driven by usefulness, not broad SEO advertising rules of
| thumb where things _are_ fuzzy.
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