[HN Gopher] Website search hurts my feelings
___________________________________________________________________
Website search hurts my feelings
Author : earthboundkid
Score : 315 points
Date : 2023-12-26 13:18 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openmymind.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openmymind.net)
| samirillian wrote:
| Tangential, but Librivox's search leaves a lot to be desired. I
| love that project, and can mostly just use Google, but it would
| be a great volunteer project for some good Samaritan with a
| little more experience enhancing search than me.
| vasco wrote:
| If heads of product were forced to use their own products for a
| full afternoon every week the quality of the web would increase a
| lot.
|
| The amount of high level product people that can't demo their own
| product and cannot find features they hype up in slide decks is
| depressing.
| satyrnein wrote:
| Not disagreeing, but this example seems like a data/tagging
| problem which is probably some other department.
| vasco wrote:
| Which would be flagged in the weekly review on the first
| week?
| malfist wrote:
| Data tagging makes Walmart throw a huge banner ad for
| pancakes into your search for lentils?
| Zetobal wrote:
| I mean if someone tags pancakes as lentils... that said we
| had great success by using gpt4-v for product tagging tbh.
| it really is a game changer.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Lentil pancakes are actually a thing to be fair.
| marcinzm wrote:
| The money from showing a pancake ad make them do that. It's
| not a search problem. They know it's not a good experience
| but they also know it makes them more money than not
| showing it. The goal is money. Your experience is merely a
| means to that end.
|
| The profit margins on selling products are abysmal for
| e-commerce. The profit margins on ads are amazing.
| ellisv wrote:
| Ideally, manufacturers and sellers would provide more,
| accurate information about products -- but I generally like
| how Google solved this within Google Maps via crowdsourcing
| by prompting users to answer questions about places (e.g.
| does this place have a wheelchair ramp?). I wish there was a
| better process to collect and store product information so it
| could be more easily shared.
| pc86 wrote:
| And in any sane company, the minute a product person says "oh
| this egregious error is a problem for some other department"
| they'd be fired immediately, so it still sounds like a useful
| exercise.
|
| I'll be the first admit I don't have a ton of respect for the
| "product owner" role which has morphed largely into Tom
| Smykowski from Office Space[0] but the places I've seen them
| be actually effective and net positives for an organization
| are where they have the reach and authority to demand things
| like this be fixed, regardless of what department is "in
| charge." IMO a product owner who doesn't do this is refusing
| to do one of the few useful product owner roles.
|
| [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/characters/nm0726223
| prepend wrote:
| I've had good results with brute forcing tagging even when
| it's not my job.
|
| If I use my product and hate it, I make it better. Knowing
| they some other department sucks for years is no good.
|
| I think all this boils down to companies not really giving a
| flip.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The product is bad. Shifting the blame around doesn't
| magically make the product better.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I've worked on products with ALL of these exact issues. The
| answer is usually that the data isn't annotated well enough, or
| that there are not enough developer resources to make special
| case fixes for things 99% of people don't notice or care about
| (and so are not losing us money, they just annoy us). At the
| companies I worked for, fixing these problems was not within
| the remit of the head of product, they were cross-departmental
| issues and so were in that pernicious category of problems that
| are highly resistant to change. I _assume_ the reason you think
| product people are responsible for this is because you aren 't
| a product person, but in my experience those are the people who
| most desperately want this type of shit to be fixed, because it
| makes them look like clowns.
| vasco wrote:
| The responsibility of a product person is that the product
| works well. This includes working with design and engineering
| partners as well as any data annotation departments. If the
| search experience is shit and the head of product doesn't
| think it's up to them, they aren't being responsible for the
| product.
| whstl wrote:
| The reason the responsibility for this is on heads of
| products is not because they're directly responsible for
| annotating, it's because they're responsible for knowing what
| can and will get annotated so the feature they asked for
| actually works.
|
| The work of product person shouldn't stop at the idea phase.
| marcinzm wrote:
| In my experience it's not just about using a product but
| understanding how a product functions under the hood. Yelling
| "fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it" in a loop at random teams
| tends to not actually get things fixed. Instead you'll get a
| lot of blame shifting, a lot of random "projects" to improve
| things and in the end no improvement (or often an even worse
| experience). In other words you'll get corporate politics. Very
| few executives understand a modern search stack in anything
| resembling a useful level of detail much less how their teams
| map to it.
| bozhark wrote:
| Even web search sucks now
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Depends to some degree which search engine you're using, even
| with all the so-called "AI" pissing in the soup.
| trgn wrote:
| I wish there still was decent boolean keyword search out
| there.
| jddj wrote:
| I've never been lucky(?) enough to reach a scale or level of
| domain messiness where the standard method of indexing things
| naievely in elasticsearch or even typesense breaks down.
|
| Especially to such an extent as the umbrella example.
|
| What's the failure mode here? Microservices that "own their own
| data"?
| ckorhonen wrote:
| The main failure mode here I find is nuances in more
| specialized datasets. Elasticsearch is great, powerful and easy
| to work with once you get the hang of it, but is very open-
| ended with lots of room to build a sub-optimal solution.
|
| Fuzzy matching and boosting often trip people up or lead to
| folks shooting themselves in the foot relevancy-wise.
|
| If you want really great results, you need to spend the time
| crafting your query, dealing with synonyms ("pop" vs. "soda"),
| stemming, typos, negative boosts ("non-alcoholic", in the
| example) etc.
|
| It's not necessarily hard, just often forgotten or not included
| in the initial scope.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Many if not most ecom sites will be using a vendor for search
| (e.g. Bloomreach) so they're sending a feed of product data to
| their vendor, just a subset of their product data (which may
| not have enough metadata for some facets people might
| reasonably expect). That means there's lag, and also that the
| integration is stiff and brittle, hard to change without time
| and money. Even then, whether they're rolling their own search
| or using a 3rd party, nine times out of ten their search will
| be ONLY for products, good luck if you wanted to search for a
| phrase from their privacy policy; for that or any sort of other
| non-product content you're forced to use Google/Bing/ddg etc.
| dbetteridge wrote:
| I honestly don't understand how some websites have such awful
| search (Like these examples)
|
| You can get better results with a 5minute tsvector in Postgres,
| At least it will show the words you typed in in the results!
|
| And yes I understand it may be a different "scale" of products,
| but do people not test these things?
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| I spent a couple of minutes thinking of a good example of
| search. Google? No more by a long shot, Amazon also a cesspool.
| Finder finds too many irrelevant files (no matter what I type
| it returns a huge list of node_modules matches), this one might
| be on me. Search on Windows I haven't bothered in years.
|
| The only search tools that actually give me great value are
| history shell with fzf on the terminal, and grep (and similar
| like ag or ripgrep) in combination with a fuzzy search frontend
| (similar to piping grep to fzf).
|
| I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess searching just
| sucks now.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Launchbar on Mac and Everything on Windows are pretty great,
| though they solve very different problems.
| kaibee wrote:
| Newegg had (has? haven't used in a while) very good search
| categories for PC hardware.
| Podgajski wrote:
| Amazon is beyond frustrating. The amount of totally unrelated
| results to a search is so frustrating. And I mean totally
| unrelated.
| pimlottc wrote:
| My cynical take is that they don't care what you buy, as long
| as you buy something. So the more results, the better. Even if
| they don't exactly match what you asked for. After all, the
| absolute worst thing to do would not show any (purchasable)
| results at all.
|
| If you want to get academic with it, you could say something
| about revealed preferences vs stated preferences (they asked
| for Coke but they really wanted Pepsi), but I really think
| they're just throwing as many suggestions at the user as
| possible in the hopes they stay engaged on the site and
| eventually click buy on something.
| gniv wrote:
| > I honestly don't understand how some websites have such awful
| search
|
| Good website search is hard. Funnily in some respects it's
| harder than web search, since there are no popularity signals a
| la pagerank. (There could be such signals, but you have to work
| hard to create them.)
| okasaki wrote:
| Vaguely related but Firefox on android history search (well,
| autocomplete) is awful. n -> suggests nothing
| ne -> suggests news.ycombinator.com new -> suggests
| news.ycombinator.com news -> suggests nothing
| news. -> suggests nothing news.y -> suggests nothing
| news.yc -> suggests nothing news.yco -> suggests nothing
| news.ycom -> suggests nothing news.ycomb -> suggests
| nothing news.ycombi -> suggests nothing
| news.ycombin -> suggests nothing news.ycombina ->
| suggests nothing news.ycombinat -> suggests nothing
| news.ycombinato -> suggests nothing news.ycombinator ->
| suggests nothing news.ycombinator. -> suggests nothing
| news.ycombinator.c -> suggests nothing
| news.ycombinator.co -> suggests news.ycombinator.com
| news.ycombinator.com -> suggests news.ycombinator.com
|
| huh???
| bee_rider wrote:
| I do not understand this phenomenon where search boxes will
| stop presenting the phrase you want, after you've typed the
| next letter in the word. new -> suggests
| news.ycombinator.com news -> suggests nothing
|
| How does this happen? It is bizarre, it is the most frustrating
| little thing I can think of in computers, at least since USB
| became flip-able.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| That's been on the back of my mind but I guess I chalked it
| up to a bug and didn't think too much about it.
|
| You're right though, this is incredibly dumb design.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| There is a logic, you type "n" and "news.yc[...].com" comes
| up, so when you type "ne" then you're presumably (the logic
| goes) looking for something other than the website that was
| just presented to you; otherwise you would have chosen that
| website already rather than continuing to search by adding
| more letters.
|
| In practice people type what they think will turn up the
| results "news", say, and don't look at the results until
| they're finished typing.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess that logic isn't totally absurd. In that case, it
| would be nice if, under their "current best guess," a
| descending list of all the previous "best guesses" was
| shown.
|
| Another annoying aspect to it is that things enter your
| history as you browse, so the number of characters to hit
| that point where it shows what you want might shift around.
| Which totally destroys muscle memory. This isn't the
| browser's fault of course, but it would be nice if they
| could design around it.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| I think there is some weighting based on how often you go to
| a certain result after typing a certain number of letters.
| For example, since I was just doing Advent of Code and going
| to related sites:
|
| a, ad, adv -> first result is adventofcode.com/2023
|
| adve -> first result is adventofcode.com/2023/day/1
| [honestly, this one baffles me, but I guess I went back to
| day 1 at some point after typing `adve`]
|
| adven, advent, advento -> first result is
| reddit.com/r/adventofcode
|
| adventof -> back to adventofcode.com/2023
|
| I actually *appreciate* this behavior; it means I can better
| muscle-memory a certain number of letters and go down to the
| first result when 2 sites have similar names (very annoying
| for twitter & twitch btw).
|
| So I don't think the problem is that weights can change as
| you type more letters; but that an entry can disappear
| altogether when there are no other suggestions.
| basil-rash wrote:
| I'd much prefer they took VS Code's fuzzy non contiguous
| substring searching algorithm. ra would be
| reddit.com/r/adventifcode, same for redadv, or r/a, etc.
| and things like a, ad, a3, etc. would be
| adventofcode.com/2023
|
| And if they included the full URL, sheesh... you could
| effortlessly query against search params, path segments,
| fragments, and origins all in one intuitive interface.
| billyjmc wrote:
| Not quite the same, but iOS gives me trouble with its word
| suggestions. Usually, it's contractions that make me curse.
|
| 'It' suggests It, It's, and Its.
|
| 'Its' suggests Its and Itself.
|
| Given that the apostrophe requires accessing a different
| keyboard overlay, and that only two suggestions are presented
| (leaving one suggestion slot empty), why not just include the
| contraction "It's" in the suggestions?
| wharvle wrote:
| A few versions back, iOS started sometimes not finding my
| searches in settings _at all_.
|
| Like I'll search the full word "passwords", pausing after
| each letter, and not get the entry titled "passwords" in my
| results the whole time. Back out, do it again, this time
| it's there by the time I type "pas".
|
| This used to work perfectly, but has been _inconsistently_
| broken for years now. Most recent time I saw it was a week
| or two ago, so it's still happening. What's most baffling
| to me is that a search over such a relatively static
| dataset (app settings are in there, but those don't get
| added or modified often) can be non-deterministic.
| malfist wrote:
| The worst offender of this practice has to be the windows start
| menu. Even when you fully type the executable name, it can show
| up below the fold under unrelated results.
|
| Just try to get to display settings on windows these days
| through the start menu.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| The windows search bar will search half the web before
| showing you a small exe that you've had installed for a year.
| Kubuxu wrote:
| Which is why I have disabled that functionality. I also
| don't need M$ to know every app I'm running on my PC
| (although they probably have that data some other way).
| fuzzbazz wrote:
| After disabling the web search capability it seems to work
| properly, for me.
| kakaz wrote:
| It is by design. You are talking about company which count
| from 3.11 to 11 going via 98. ...
| fragmede wrote:
| it's as easy as start -> run -> "ms-
| settings:display" -> enter
|
| what?
| Zetobal wrote:
| The firefox awesomebar and the history search are atrocious.
| Sometimes even if I visited the site in the last 5 minutes
| there will be no autocomplete available.
| Kubuxu wrote:
| Make sure to change omnibar settings to prefer history over
| search.
| Zetobal wrote:
| Wow. That helped quite a bit, thank you.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| It's been that way for years: https://github.com/mozilla-
| mobile/fenix/issues/20351
|
| I lost hope it and other issues would be fixed and moved to
| Chromium on Android.
| Gracana wrote:
| The one that really hurts my feelings is when the search function
| on a manufacturer's website doesn't recognize their own part
| numbers. Then I get angry and go to google, which gives me
| unrelated ad results instead. Ah, familiarity.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Having previously worked for a company with this problem,
| sometimes you need to start pulling other people's teeth to get
| them to stop putting data in random fields.
|
| We just told our customers to google the part number. I don't
| know how these places stay in business.
| pc86 wrote:
| I've never worked at a place where part numbers mattered, but
| I am very familiar with this mindset of non-technical people
| that basically boils down to "just put whatever you want in
| whatever text field then act befuddled when the system
| doesn't work perfectly."
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I've often fantasised about scraping Amazon just to be able to
| actually search on the site.
|
| eBay too, it's OK (compared to Amazon) but most of the items on a
| search are always "mousepad [or whatever] suitable for" the
| laptop you searched for. Why eBay don't clean up their categories
| and ban sellers I don't know, it makes the site so much worse to
| use.
|
| I wonder if anyone is _ever_ hoodwinked by the vast majority of
| sites that sort by Most Expensive by default?
|
| It's all part of enshittification presumably, these sites monitor
| so many metrics it must surely be a profit generator to make
| search frustratingly bad.
| jzb wrote:
| My wife prefers to use curbside pickup for groceries, and orders
| via the Harris Teeter website. It's a disaster.
|
| The site search picks up unrelated items, misses others, and so
| on. I would complain about the inventory management/substitutions
| too - but since they also have in store shoppers using the same
| inventory I guess they can't always be 100% about what's on the
| shelf.
|
| You'd think a chain that size could do better, but I doubt they
| have much incentive. The competition is minimal and not any
| better.
| gosub100 wrote:
| we're all looking at these as technical mistakes, but it
| wouldn't surprise me at all if, during A/B testing, people
| spend more when search doesn't quite work. For a similar reason
| as why they put milk in the back of the store. optimizing
| shoppers' efficiency doesn't optimize their profit.
| gniv wrote:
| On the other end of the spectrum, I've been impressed by Netflix
| search. I would search a name and they do not have that movie,
| but would suggest a mix of similar movies, movies with the same
| actors or director. It's pretty clever, I just wish they were
| more explicit about it, as in showing the reasoning behind
| choosing a result.
| pknerd wrote:
| Do not want to miss a chance to empty your pockets
| eatonphil wrote:
| That doesn't make a ton of sense in the Netflix case since
| presumably it's actually more expensive for every additional
| movie you watch since your subscription price is fixed and
| each additional movie you watch costs bandwidth and compute?
| pknerd wrote:
| I will get bored if I am not exposed to what is available
| on the platform and will get unsubscribed. It's like social
| feed of a social media platform
| madeofpalk wrote:
| On the other hand, people that don't watch any content are
| at the highest risk of cancelling their membership.
| lukevp wrote:
| Netflix wants you to justify the cost in your mind. The
| bandwidth is free. Netflix is such a high volume of
| internet traffic that the CDNs actually have edge content
| caches within the DCs of most major ISPs, so when you
| stream you're actually streaming from a box at your ISP (or
| a cross connect to Netflix) and not costing Netflix any
| internet-facing bandwidth besides API calls. This setup is
| cheaper for everyone because the ISP doesn't have to
| subscribe as large of an internet pipe because the high
| bandwidth streaming is siphoned off into private networking
| and never leaves the DC.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Sweet! Can Netflix search by age rating yet?
| gniv wrote:
| Start typing something like age:8 and you'll get a relevant
| category suggestion.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| age:35
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| >a relevant category suggestion
|
| I had waited so long for rating filters, my kids became
| adults.
|
| However, I _was_ wondering what Netflix got after 17 years
| of development at $215k-$700k per dev - and now I know.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| You can type age:!well to get movies that didn't age well.
| cykros wrote:
| Just watched Trading Places again on Christmas Eve. While I
| wouldn't say it's aged terribly, I will say this: nobody
| does blackface like Dan Akroyd.
| leephillips wrote:
| I don't understand. How is it useful for Netflix to show me
| movies that they don't have? And how hard is it to implement
| search over their catalog when they only seem to have about 100
| movies?
| pc86 wrote:
| Just because they don't have the rights to stream The Office
| doesn't mean they don't know what shows and movies they have
| are enjoyed by people who also enjoy The Office. This is
| literally the entire point of search - show what you're
| searching for if it exists, and show related things after it.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > This is literally the entire point of search - show what
| you're searching for if it exists, and show related things
| after it.
|
| That might make sense in an abstract way, but no, that's
| not what people expect. If I'm searching for something at
| Netflix, I don't want the answer to "does it exist?", I
| want the answer to "do you have available for viewing?".
| pc86 wrote:
| So you search for The Office on Netflix which is only
| available on Peacock as far as I know. How is a screen
| that says "We don't have The Office, sorry!" with no
| other information at all preferable to this?
| https://i.imgur.com/W6a1hDk.png
| cratermoon wrote:
| No, it's fine to offer similar products. Good on Netflix
| for this.
|
| In the more general sense of the search topic, I don't
| want a search to return things they don't have. If it's
| out of stock, say so prominently. Don't make the user
| click through to the item itself only to see "out of
| stock".
| ry4nolson wrote:
| but netflix doesn't tell you that. if they don't have
| what you searched for, it shows you other things they DO
| have that are similar.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I had migrated to watching Netflix content on pirate sites for
| the better experience and stayed for the better experience.
|
| > I've been impressed by Netflix search. I would search a name
| and they do not have that movie, but would suggest a mix of
| similar movies, movies with the same actors or director.
|
| An excellent, early pirate feature. Good on Netflix for
| adopting it.
| nurbl wrote:
| Searching google's movie service for older movies is annoying
| because a lot of times you just get a remake. Even if they have
| the old version! The only way I found to get to the original is
| to search for some actor in it and scroll...
| andirk wrote:
| Their input search works fine, but clicking through the
| categories seems to surface all the dogshit Netflix-created
| content first. It's like digging through trash.
|
| My main issue with the input search is the TV keyboard. There
| was a Netflix hack day that created a circular keyboard like a
| dial w/ the selector a joystick in the middle, so pressing up
| to 12 o'clock was A, 12:05 was B, etc. And the joystick would
| return to center per selection! It was everything I ever wanted
| in a thing, and now I can't even find the article on it.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Netflix search is possibly the most egregiously bad search in
| the entire industry, and unfortunately it's infecting other
| players with very stupid ideas. Netflix search is unfaceted,
| unsortable, unfilterable and worst of all it very often knows
| what you're searching for and instead of returning "we don't
| have this title" it will return a bunch of different, loosely
| related titles.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Um, no? That's not what I want when I search.
|
| On the other end of the spectrum, try Digikey:
|
| https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded/microcon...
|
| or try McMaster Carr:
|
| https://www.mcmaster.com/products/screws/socket-head-screws~...
|
| Functional, well-tagged, data-driven parametric search.
| Rockauto.com sells auto parts, which requires a whole different
| type of search, but they deliver a pretty impressive product as
| well.
|
| I suspect that much of this discrepancy is because there's
| enough of a chance that someone grocery shopping and looking
| for lentils will think "Oh, I need pancake mix too" and click
| on the ad. Meanwhile, someone looking for a specific grade of
| M8x25 socket-head cap screws or a low-power Cortex-M0
| microcontroller with a particular set of peripherals is
| unlikely to abandon their work to add a hose clamp or
| electrolytic capacitor to their cart instead.
|
| Market forces seem incapable of delivering a product with a
| better user experience if that hurts the bottom line even a
| little bit, they're doing gradient descent to local minima and
| powerless to say "no" to finance and climb out of the awful
| product that results.
| chefandy wrote:
| While the overall point holds true, some of the complaints don't
| make sense. Searching "rice" for example will probably get you
| parboiled white rice, instant red beans and rice, chicken and
| rice canned soup, and rice pudding-- many of those facets make
| prefect sense. If you were searching for rice paper for crafting,
| or even "nuts," that "food" facet would be plenty useful.
|
| You can't look at one narrow usage path to judge an interface.
| You can only customize the interface so much for specific use
| cases before it becomes confusing as hell to use because it lacks
| consistency between tasks.
| latch wrote:
| The complaint about "rice" is that the tagging is incomplete.
| "vegan" isn't a bad facet, but the count is wrong. When you
| select "vegan", most vegan products are removed. I don't see
| how filtering wrong data isn't a valid complaint.
|
| The problem is obviously that the data isn't tagged. But Costco
| is huge, profitable and doesn't have a huge inventory, so why
| can't they tag it? And if the tags are so incomplete, maybe
| it's better not to include them?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Tagging products sounds like something a LLM could do rather
| well with just a little human supervision.
| binarymax wrote:
| Have worked on this and it's between 60 and 90% OK in my
| experiments. You run into lots of fun issues because people
| don't write titles and descriptions for machines, they
| write them to appeal to human emotions to close a sale.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Searching "rice" for example will probably get you parboiled
| white rice, instant red beans and rice, chicken and rice canned
| soup, and rice pudding-- many of those facets make perfect
| sense.
|
| Well, no, if I ask for rice, the odds are overwhelming that I'm
| looking for rice, in which case chicken and rice canned soup is
| a totally inappropriate response. It would make as much sense
| as returning alcohol-free wine when asked for "alcohol".
| Spivak wrote:
| But chicken and rice canned soup contains rice and the word
| is part of its logical title.
|
| You should be able to unearth the soup with a partial match.
| What makes the alcohol/alcohol-free problem is that alcohol
| free is one token that can't be subdivided.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That is not a consistent position. If "alcohol free beer"
| doesn't contain the word "alcohol", then "chicken and rice
| soup" doesn't contain the word "rice".
|
| Moving the argument into the realm of things that matter,
| chicken and rice soup is not a product that can be called
| "rice", and therefore isn't an appropriate response to a
| search for "rice". The title is irrelevant; if you're
| stocking rice with a fancy name and its title _doesn 't_
| include the word "rice", that product still _should_ show
| up in a search for "rice".
| lukevp wrote:
| You're describing the problem from a computer scientist
| POV. OP is describing the problem from a user's POV. Nobody
| cares if there's a subset of their query in the title. That
| item is not "rice". No one is searching for "rice" and
| wants soup. They would search for "soup" then. Tokens
| aren't all of equal value in a title, and this is a big
| part of why ecom search is horribly bad (I have spent years
| working on ecom search and partnering with vendors trying
| to improve it. It's a hard problem.)
| chefandy wrote:
| > What makes the alcohol/alcohol-free problem is that
| alcohol free is one token that can't be subdivided.
|
| It's not even a problem... it's an unfounded assumption
| that alcohol-free wine wouldn't ever be relevant to the
| user at all. If the only place open on a holiday was
| Walmart that I didn't realize didn't sell booze, and I
| needed some kind of booze to make a pan sauce or a braise,
| I wouldn't necessarily think to search for non-alcoholic
| booze-- but it would be a very useful substitution for me,
| and not by accident... they're two versions of the same
| product. I'd much rather see that they had non-alcoholic
| beer and wine in my search than completely empty search
| results.
|
| This is why competent companies hire designers to work on
| interactions like this rather than leaving it up to the
| implementing developer's gut instinct about user needs. If
| only the tagging could keep up.
| chefandy wrote:
| Assuming these sorts of things about your users' intent
| causes big usability problems. Trying to predict how users
| will use search usually ends up more frustrating than not for
| many people. Most people who use these tools don't have a
| working mental model of how search engines work, so they
| can't troubleshoot easily if your expectations and theirs
| don't line up. This is exactly the sort of "smart" feature
| that developers crow about all the time. Unless you have some
| way of predicting how individual people will use search boxes
| then you're much better off with something more general.
| 4pkjai wrote:
| There's a restaurant website in Hong Kong that lets you search by
| region.
|
| However it shows restaurants that paid to be featured at the top
| of the results.
|
| So the search results will often contain restaurants that are
| multiple hours away.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| To some extent, this is consistent with Google's mobile Maps
| version when searching for anything. It returns "Relevance" by
| default, not by "Distance".
|
| I also noticed the same in several other website where
| "relevance" trumps my sort request (e.g., price, distance).
| core-utility wrote:
| I hate this with a passion. I can be out somewhere, knowing
| that there's likely a McDonald's nearby. I zoom in to my
| location, type in McDonald's, and it zooms out to a 25 mile
| radius to show me every single McDonald's in the area
| including the one 0.1 miles away (that I then have to zoom
| all the way back into to get)
| grogenaut wrote:
| More favorite of mine is then it decides to fire up the
| first time user experience for some new features for you or
| shift into driving mode you thought you disabled. The you
| click what you think is the nearest MCD and it's the one
| close as the crow flies and on the other side of the
| freeway so 3 miles away.
|
| Search along route sometimes works better and sometimes
| also zooms out.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| The last time I used Craigslist to apartment hunt, people spam
| the listings with the name of places 30 minutes away for some
| reason, as though I would just give up on living in the
| neighborhood I was searching for if I saw there was something
| somewhere completely different at a price that wasn't even that
| good.
| gumby wrote:
| These are hilarious and infuriating but also, perhaps, correct?
|
| My gf (who used to work in the sector) says a lot of people like
| to sit in front of the TV and "watch what's on" -- one of the
| reasons broadcast TV still exists.
|
| You see this with sites like Netflix becoming decreasingly
| useful, urging you to simply click on something rather than
| consult your curated watch list. Some of them now _hide_ your
| watch list!
|
| She suggests the same applies to shopping: some people just want
| to push the buy button, which is well known in brick and mortar
| retail, especially low margin ones like grocery shops: end caps,
| mid shelves and all sorts of other strategies are used to get you
| to either buy on impulse or buy the version they'd rather sell of
| what you have in mind.
|
| So for these sites the same applies: show a few options and the
| customer will simply pick one. Spam the tags, DWIM the customer's
| ill-formed, uninformed, or simply unsatisfiable query, and see if
| the punter buys.
|
| For nerds like us this is a pessimization. But perhaps for the
| majority this works better.
| pc86 wrote:
| I've noticed a lot of streaming services will inconsistently
| show your watch list and/or show it in different locations on
| the home screen. I've long wondered if it's a mix of certain
| services just not being available or taking too long to respond
| when loading the lolomo (to use Netflix's term) and automated
| A/B tests trying to maximize some metric other than "starts
| watching something."
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice
|
| Mentally when I'm at a store and I have 3 options to pick from
| I seemingly enjoy the process better then if I had 6 or 10.
| Eventually the picking itself becomes work. If it's a topic I
| enjoy like motherboards or RAM then all the choices are fine, I
| can spend hours on that, but if I'm picking tomato sauce for a
| quick and sloppy dish I don't want to spend the time selecting.
| mmahemoff wrote:
| Yep. YouTube search has become smart about this, blending
| search with browsing. It typically gives you a handful of
| reasonably close matches, followed by a whole lot of wildly
| offtopic suggestions based on subscriptions, watch history, or
| who even knows. And this happens even when there would be more
| relevant results to show, i.e., there's not even a pretence of
| trying to give the N most relevant results. The game is to
| populate search with whatever users will click on.
| alexhsamuel wrote:
| What you're describing isn't "search", designed to give me
| information I asked for. It's a recommendation engine, designed
| to induce a behavior in me, whose input is the "search term" I
| entered (plus god knows what other tracking data). The
| distinction is important: the recommendation engine is designed
| to get me to buy something (not necessarily what I came to
| buy), whereas my intention was to buy something (or buy
| nothing, if they don't have it). Calling this recommendation
| engine "search" is IMO deceptive.
|
| Maybe if I'm on Netflix to watch what's on, that's fine. But
| e.g. on Amazon, I find "search" so adversarial that I often
| close the tab and go somewhere else, or give up.
| flenserboy wrote:
| The point of website search (at least on commerce sites) is not
| to help the users find what they're searching for, but to put
| other, possibly related, products in front of their eyes. On most
| sites drilling down through limiters falls apart after about the
| third or fourth restriction is chosen, often because the sites
| seem designed to not give three or four clear choices (which is
| what the user wants to see), but ten or more vaguely related
| items (is this due to the fear that giving three or four results
| will imply that the site has a shortage of items to choose
| from?). Keep marketers & managers away from site design.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I may be wrong, but my guess is the site makes its money off
| those 'promoted' search terms of most popular/most profitable
| items and the work needed for the long tail doesn't seem worth
| it for most teams.
| binarymax wrote:
| It's both. What you're referring to is "searchandizing", and
| it's a component of e-commerce for sure. But if you're not also
| retrieving what the customer wants you'll just piss them off
| and they'll shop elsewhere.
| cratermoon wrote:
| It's the digital equivalent of putting the cans of nacho cheese
| dip on a little rack in front of the shelves of tortilla chips.
| flenserboy wrote:
| I can see that. It feels more like the car salesman who says,
| "Sure, you can look at the car you actually came here to see,
| but only after I show you three more we'd prefer to sell."
| travoc wrote:
| It's more like asking the clerk where to find the fruit salad
| and him giving you directions to strawberry ice cream.
| timeon wrote:
| You are both right. GP described intent of store, while you
| have described result.
| timeon wrote:
| This has already roots in real stores where they shuffle stuff
| so it is harder for you to search for just what you need. It
| was counter-intuitive for me at first. Because if I can't find
| in store/site what I need I just leave. But enough people will
| buy also other things that store put in their way. So broken
| search is feature, not bug.
| nateburke wrote:
| Fixing this is the promise of enterprise deployments of LLMs,
| correct? That you can take the list of initial result texts from
| a shitty elasticsearch implementation, pass it into an LLM with a
| prompt "you are a user looking for <query>, please use common
| sense to comb through these results and find a few good ones" and
| get better intramural search quality.
|
| The only other enterprise application I am aware of is applying
| the homework cheating app to customer facing roles that require
| email/copy generation.
| regularjack wrote:
| Implementing search correctly would solve the problem too,
| without requiring a square kilometer of GPUs.
| Spivak wrote:
| Right but implementing search correctly often means humans
| combing through the data and applying common sense to tag the
| products with their actual facets. So really you're just
| choosing between a square kilometer of office space for cheap
| labor or GPUs.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > you're just choosing between a square kilometer of office
| space for cheap labor or GPUs.
|
| No, with LLMs you're getting _both_ , because a. LLMs need
| the human-curated data to ingest and b. after training the
| model is going to get RLHF.
|
| Also, a square kilometer of office space still uses much
| less electricity than a square kilometer of GPUs.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I'm guessing we're at or very near the point where LLMs could
| tag the data better and cheaper than humans.
| lukevp wrote:
| If you have >100k items, "implementing search correctly" is
| an intractable problem if you don't have a hundred person
| team of search relevance optimizers and taggers. Search is
| terrible until you gather tons of metadata about each item.
| Search is not nearly as simple as text matching within
| product titles. An LLM by comparison is peanuts. You could
| run it overnight and just have it build tags and metadata for
| all your items and it would probably be 75% accurate and a
| hell of a lot cheaper. Things can then be fine tuned by
| people later.
| lightbendover wrote:
| At Amazon scale that last x% is a multi-decade problem and
| still going. It's intractable full stop.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Feels like there's a pretty widespread problem that goes
| something like this:
|
| * PO: We need search!
|
| * PM to architect: Google how to implement search!
|
| * Architect: _googles "best search library 2023 java"_ Aha! Let's
| use Elasticsearch!
|
| * PM to Team: Alright, I need a search feature next sprint.
| Architect googled for 5 minutes and says we should use
| elasticsearch!
|
| * Team: Alright, integrating elasticsearch in a sprint should
| work. Bob, you work on loading the data, Eve, you work on
| rendering the search results.
|
| * Team (2-3 weeks later): Another successful value delivery!
| Alright, what's next PM?
|
| * PM: PO says we need a chat bot...
|
| If it's not obvious why this is a problem, getting search to work
| well requires a lot of tweaking and tuning. You can't just slap a
| search engine into a product and expect it to work well. It's
| hilariously incompatible with the assembly line style of work
| that many software outfits employ these days. It also requires
| deep understanding of what a search engine does and how its
| algorithms work.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Intellectually, I knew this was common but I never stopped to
| consider how fortunate I am to work for a company who
| understands things like search are difficult.
|
| It helps we have two internal departments whose primary jobs
| are data management and analysis. (Real statistics, not "AI".)
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| There are actually plenty of non-ES products that are way
| easier to integrate and tune (and get better results with less
| effort).
|
| - Typesense (https://github.com/typesense/typesense)
|
| - Algolia
|
| - Google Programmable Search Engine
| (https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/)
| eusto wrote:
| It's more about what the company considers core business and
| what not. Most often they don't see the website as being
| important enough to the business so they don't invest in it.
|
| We have gotten used to almost flawless experiences from amazon
| shopping. Google search finds (or used to) results sometimes
| almost like magic, etc. The thing is, that's the core business.
| These companies invent new technologies and have huge teams
| because doing this is so hard.
|
| Now take a random supermarket chain. Their knowledge is about
| physical stores. Their core business has taught them where to
| open a store and how to arrange things in it so that they
| maximize their sales in that environment. It's very hard and it
| takes a very long time to shift to an online model. You have to
| find people with the right competencies and the right
| leadership to convince the company to do this and this is
| actually very hard to do.
|
| Look at the categories example. That, to me, screams backend
| database. The company has invested a lot of money into building
| business intelligence on top of their physical stores. That
| organization screams "perfectly curated data warehouse" and I
| imagine suggesting something like "we need to reorganize the
| way we store data" is going to be met with blank stares if not
| full on outrage.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| > almost flawless experiences from amazon shopping
|
| It's pretty good, but there are some longtime flaws that blow
| my mind, such as the order of results when sorting by price.
| It never makes sense to me.
| toast0 wrote:
| I _think_ order by price might be ordering by the lowest
| available price at time of index. This could be an out of
| date price if the index isn 't updated when other pricing
| is updated. It almost certainly doesn't include shipping,
| as that can vary depending on where the item is and where
| you are so it can't be indexed. Filtering by seller doesn't
| change the sorting, in my experience, and I think neither
| does filtering by condition.
|
| So, if someone is selling a used item in poor condition
| with maximum shipping, that product is going to sort as a
| low priced item.
|
| At least, that's my reverse engineered understanding.
| core-utility wrote:
| > almost flawless experiences from amazon shopping
|
| In my opinion its too fuzzy, which is usually the opposite
| problem I have with website searches (e.g. searching a news
| site for keywords of an article I know exits, but it's taking
| me too literally)
|
| If I search for "iPhone 14 Pro case", I don't want to see
| cases for iPhone 15 __, or non-pro models. I've (to my own
| fault) bought way too many of the wrong product because I
| search for a specific model and don't read the title before
| ordering, only to realize that Amazon didn't give me exactly
| what I typed in.
| theamk wrote:
| > flawless experiences from amazon shopping
|
| what kind of stiff are you buying you call this "flawless"?
| In my experience the Amazon search is worst there is. Search
| for "AAA batteries" and it will offer you AA and even N ones.
| Why on earth would anyone want that?
|
| They even got the basics wrong. The other day I was searching
| for power bank under $5. Instead, many listings was $10+. How
| hard is it to get this right?
|
| Because of horrible search quality I actively avoid Amazon
| when I can.
| User23 wrote:
| A big reason why is Search today is an AI Librarian. That AI
| may be more or less smart, but at the end of the result that's
| what people mean when they say Search. They certainly do not
| mean a robust query language that will allow them to
| iteratively refine down a subset of matching documents in a
| corpus until the desired document is found.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I think if you remove the cariacature that approach isn't
| terrible, assuming there's no more suitable technology. Why not
| have a basic search and iterate, including iterating the
| technology choice. You can hide it behind a feature flag if you
| don't think it's ready.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The problem is that the sort of stuff you need to tune a
| search engine to actually perform well doesn't look like
| work. It simply can't be broken down into deliveries that
| provide incremental business value, and throughout the entire
| process it's going to look like a bunch of fiddling with
| numbers with nothing to show for it.
| toast0 wrote:
| Does any product feature that requires care and maintenance
| easily fit the model of delivering incremental value?
|
| But for a search engine, showing incremental value should
| be easy if you have a real product reason to do it. If you
| expect search to help people find content, then you look at
| statistics on engagement --- in aggregate did people use
| search, does it look like they found what they wanted, did
| they return and use search again. In specific, which
| queries seem popular and provide good results, which
| queries seem popular and don't provide good results. You
| provide incremental value by moving queries from the second
| to the first category, where possible. If you can kind of
| classify some of the less popular queries, there's value in
| improving results for those too, but classification is also
| hard.
|
| Sometimes the numbers are easy... I participated in an
| application of search where a support request hit the FAQ
| before submission --- if search works, there should be
| fewer tickets and especially fewer tickets where the user
| can easily solve their own problem. Search in a shopping
| context should lead to more sales. Etc.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think you may miss how many technology projects fail in
| companies. A company may have no internal knowledge or
| skill to make search better, so they get an outside
| contracting group that produces a shitty product that
| doesn't improve sales and costs an extraordinary amount
| for the lack of results.
|
| Quite often the company won't make any more in those long
| tail sales, but instead better placement of the products
| they buy in mass.
| rascul wrote:
| A little bit related, I wish web sites would stop hijacking the
| keys for my browser's search function.
| andirk wrote:
| Almost every hijacking of keyboard and other default behaviors
| of our peripherals is lazy and arrogant UI. One exception is
| auto focusing on a search input element where that view is only
| used for that search box. Even then it's annoying because my
| browser back/forward via keyboard (cmd-left, cmd-right) gets
| hijacked by the focus.
| renewiltord wrote:
| All this is unavoidable. But it's also temporary. This phase of
| search won't last since we're going to replace it with just SKU +
| inventory plus some fulltext search plus an LLM. An LLM browser
| assistant could probably solve this problem quite well.
|
| Inventory will never be well-tagged. The process change to ensure
| it would slow down procurement.
|
| Ideally, they'd expose an inventory XML list and we'd just use
| our LLM on it.
|
| The hard part is how to incentivize by permitting them control
| over advertising. An alternative is the browser LLM just
| searching across the page (Arc Browser can do this).
| squarefoot wrote:
| One thing for sure is that shitty search algorithms in a page
| showing ads before search results, have the useful side effect of
| forcing users to refine search, exposing them to more ads before
| they find what they were searching for.
| ano-ther wrote:
| Tagging ins tedious. Especially when it's not you who searches
| but lots of other people, all with their specific ways of
| describing what they are looking for.
|
| And yes, the results are between amusing, annoying and
| infuriating.
|
| The "alcohol" example finding mostly comes from alcohol free
| products advertising this feature in their name - no need to name
| your regular beer or wine "with alcohol", at least not in the
| product name.
| nox100 wrote:
| tagging doesn't work period because people will tag things to
| try to get their product in front of your eyes and add any tag
| they think is popular entirely unrelated to their "product".
| Solvency wrote:
| So why not punish them and have bots regularly scan/assess
| tags for relevance.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Leaving myself a note here for when I'm back behind a computer.
|
| I'm wondering how well something like GPT-4 generates tags with
| a product description/product image. Be interesting to see its
| accuracy and comprehensiveness.
| plz-remove-card wrote:
| On officedepot.com when searching for a produect I have found no
| way to filter by "in stock at my chosen store" you have to
| search, then click through each individual item.
|
| The one and only reason I am considering office depot as a place
| to spend my money is because they're local and I can go get
| whatever cable or thing I need, right now.
| ruined wrote:
| analytics have confirmed that surfacing inventory status is bad
| for the customer because it reduces conversion
| ljdtt wrote:
| Interesting. Do you have sources to read more about it?
| lukevp wrote:
| Bad for the store you mean? Because the customer doesn't
| convert (buy) something if it says "hurry only 1 left in
| stock" because everyone knows that store inventory is
| inaccurate and they ultimately don't have 1 in stock, they
| have 0 in stock?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The way I interpret the comment, it says this:
|
| A. [explicit claim; humorous] Analytics confirm that, if
| you show people whether products are in stock locally, they
| won't buy those products on your website.
|
| B. [by implication] This is bad, because it "lowers" your
| sales. So you can't display this information.
|
| C. [by implication] The retailers are making a mistake -
| the reason people don't buy products on the website when
| availability information is displayed is that they go to
| the store and buy the product there.
|
| D. [summing up] If you measure something you don't care
| about, you will end up doing things that make you look like
| an idiot.
| ruined wrote:
| close enough
| underlipton wrote:
| That's not a good explanation. Either GGP was being
| sarcastic or is corpo-brained. GP was confused because,
| unfortunately, both are equally likely these days.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Is it good for conversion when I give up out of frustration
| at your broken store and decide to just get the thing on
| Amazon instead?
|
| This isn't just hypothetical: for a while I was using QFC
| (Kroger) for grocery pickup, but after one too many instances
| of adding an item to my cart and then only finding out at
| checkout that a third of my items weren't actually available,
| I said to hell with it and switched to doing all that at
| Whole Foods instead, since their inventory counts are
| actually correct.
| javari wrote:
| I did just check this, and I found it fairly easy to filter by
| in-stock at my chosen store. Did you set a preferred store then
| filter by the "store pickup" option? Doing that, I returned
| results for chair mats with the option to check other local
| stores.
| driverdan wrote:
| This drives me crazy. Local stock search is different on each
| store and most don't work correctly.
|
| Try searching on Walmart to find local stock. You have to click
| "In-Store", then change the Fulfillment Speed to today and
| tomorrow to find things that are in stock. Except now they also
| show results from other stores, like Advance Auto Parts, and
| there's no way to filter that garbage out.
|
| I tried searching Academy Sports for local stock. The list of
| items says it's in stock but when you go to the individual item
| it says it's OOS.
|
| Lowe's and Home Depot local stock does seem to work reasonably
| well, for now.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| That's what you get when your AI Powered Search system is
| implemented by Web3 Experts who just pivoted to AI.
| binarymax wrote:
| Love this article. Worked as a search relevance consultant for
| years and these are exactly the problems we work on. Most of the
| time fixing search is a thankless job. People expect it to work
| and when it does they take it for granted, but when it doesn't it
| damages your reputation and brand.
|
| If you want to get started fixing website search relevance I
| recommend the books "Relevant Search" by Turnbull and Berryman,
| and "AI Powered Search" by Grainger, Turnbull, and yours truly.
| Both published by Manning.
| bonecrusher2102 wrote:
| Yep I work on Search as well -- both of these books are
| excellent.
|
| Website search is... hard. A lot of the faceting still needs to
| be done by hand. I think there's probably some opportunity for
| LLMs to make some sort of autotagging/categorization easier,
| but there will likely still need to be a human in the loop to
| verify.
| lukevp wrote:
| Great recommendation on Relevant Search. I worked on an ecom
| site trying to improve search relevance for years, and it's an
| incredibly difficult and challenging problem. Especially
| because it's difficult to measure success, and execs would
| constantly come up with "hey why does this query not return
| exactly the results I expected" which led to a lot of resources
| spent optimizing a handful of queries based on executive input
| instead of based on query frequency and query result conversion
| metrics.
| Solvency wrote:
| I'm not trying to fix search so what's the tldr on why it's so
| hard to do with such constrained databases? The Nintendo one
| seems insanely egregious. Is this not just a symptom of
| corporate laziness rather than search problem complexity?
| binarymax wrote:
| The searchable content may be constrained, but the queries
| aren't ;)
|
| Search is hard because you need to anticipate and model the
| language of all potential searchers and the content.
|
| There's also lots of ambiguity because you'll only get one or
| two keywords from the searcher without any other context, and
| you need to take into account trends and content quality and
| metadata.
|
| Also, in lots of cases search is bad because the product team
| either doesn't know or doesn't care.
| Solvency wrote:
| But his examples were about hardcoded filters/facets.
| binarymax wrote:
| The examples were about a keyword or two ("lentils",
| "laundry detergent", etc) and filters.
| gukoff wrote:
| He means the last examples about Nintendo.com
| esafak wrote:
| > People expect it to work and when it does they take it for
| granted, but when it doesn't it damages your reputation and
| brand.
|
| That's the definition of a table stakes feature. It's not as if
| you can not implement it and people won't notice!
| storf45 wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendations! I also work on a decently large
| ecom site and search experience is a difficult problem -
| especially in aftermarket automotive.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Years ago, I cobbled up a simple search engine for some FOSS web
| forum software, mainly for people who were running private
| instances behind login walls -- i.e., stuff that public search
| engines couldn't crawl.
|
| Someone complained that for public instances, Google worked
| better (this was back before Google started to suck).
|
| My response was that if I could write a better search engine than
| Google in my spare time, I'd be living a lifestyle considerably
| more luxurious than the one I actually had. :-)
| jklinger410 wrote:
| I have a hot take that Walmart is actually slowly going out of
| business.
|
| They don't do big box retailer stuff well (behind glass), they
| don't do local grocery well, and they don't even do discounted
| items well (5 below, Temu).
|
| Their stores are garbage and they are asleep at the wheel on
| their website.
|
| It is only a matter of time.
| travoc wrote:
| All of these things have been true since the beginning of
| Walmart. Yet here they are, almost the largest retailer on
| earth.
| andirk wrote:
| I'm currently working on a website search for e-commerce and wow
| there really is no end to what website search can and should do.
| The ANDs and the ORs are kind of confusing too. Is it AND between
| category selections, and OR within?
|
| And did anyone else notice the omission of that useless copyright
| line at the bottom of websites as if we know anything about
| copyright law?
| jwr wrote:
| I can explain this.
|
| About 15 years ago or so, together with a friend, we started a
| company whose goal was to offer a working product search for
| E-commerce.
|
| Faceting was just one aspect of the problem, a much more pressing
| issue for non-English speaking countries is that you need a way
| to deal with declension and various misspellings (especially from
| people that do not enter accented characters). So we did. Solve
| the problems, that is. With a pretty good SaaS offering,
| reasonably easy to integrate into any E-commerce site.
|
| And then we discovered that you can have a great product, but
| selling it is an entirely different problem, and we were not able
| to solve that problem. It turned out we were competing with
| marketing budgets: a customer (E-commerce site) could either pay
| us and improve the customer experience significantly, or they
| could spend this money on customer acquisition and improve the
| bottom line right away. Guess which approach won.
|
| Another realization was that customer experience might actually
| not matter much. People are used to crappy websites and will jump
| through all sorts of hoops if the price is low. So many of our
| potential customers preferred to pay for customer leads (price
| comparison sites) and offer low prices, rather than improve
| customer experience, because customer loyalty isn't necessarily a
| thing these days.
|
| Also, if your main acquisition channel is price comparison sites
| (which is the case in many countries), you don't care about
| search: customers will land directly on product pages (where the
| price is right) and will endure the crappy search to add some
| stuff to their carts.
|
| We ended up with a bunch of happy customers who stayed with the
| product for years, but we stopped trying to sell it and moved to
| other things, it was just too hard to sell.
|
| In other words, addressing the OP's (excellent) article: your
| hurt feelings don't matter much, and nobody really cares, as long
| as the customer acquisition funnel works and there is a steady
| increase in the bottom line numbers.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Perfect.
|
| While I've never been as deep in the details, my perpetual
| answer here is:
|
| "You're so vain, I bet you think this search is about you?"
|
| I understand it because people are human, but I can't help but
| feel annoyance when people are like "the search engine isn't
| doing what I want!"
|
| It's not designed to DO THAT, it's designed to maximize it's
| own sales and we're pretty much at the point where we should
| try to stop pretending otherwise.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| It's not vanity to complain that a faceted search tool is
| surfacing completely useless facets populated by obviously-
| wrong data and actively lying to the user about the number of
| results in each facet. Or returning completely unrelated
| products like an umbrella in a search for laundry detergent
| in the top 3 results.
|
| Users should expect better. People with your attitude are not
| helping.
| scotty79 wrote:
| You should have pivoted and become price comparison site with
| good product search.
| tempestn wrote:
| Comparison sites are predominantly not about good search
| either, but rather affiliate relationships.
| slig wrote:
| And borderline SERP spam tactics to get organic visitors.
| scotty79 wrote:
| So the conclusion must be there's exactly zero value in
| good search. No wonder google gets worse and worse.
| realusername wrote:
| That's the same thing for Google indeed, they are getting
| paid by the search ads so they don't care of the quality
| of what's below those.
|
| As long as the market share is that high, there's no
| reason to improve anything.
| refulgentis wrote:
| This reply is to a comment gently indicating we've
| arrived at an obviously wrong conclusion.
|
| Gliding past that with "Google [doesn't] care [about]
| search quality" doesn't add much.
| candiodari wrote:
| No there is just too much incentive for these sites to
| sabotage their search ... so they do, and nobody trusts
| them to actually find what they're looking for.
|
| Amazon avoided that for a long time, but not anymore
| (imho). These days there's lots Amazon doesn't have, and
| their search seems designed to get you buying faked
| results. And this is the case for all commercial
| searches, but still less so for Google.
| esafak wrote:
| I think whether or not it matters is contextual. If I am trying
| to get work done, or trying to buy something on your site I
| very much care if search works. UX is a feature.
|
| You can acquire customers with lower prices, but can you keep
| them with a bad UX?
| kamikaz1k wrote:
| The answer is clearly yes...
|
| It's a feature but not the only feature. Ppl complain about
| Google search (arguably their only feature) on HN everyday,
| but they're still essentially a monopoly.
| esafak wrote:
| Their monopoly status is why they can get away with it;
| don't copy them. And don't forget that their early
| attention to UX, with a spartan UI, and famously fast and
| good response is what made them succeed in the first place.
|
| Users are deciding that chatGPT offers a better search UX
| in some cases and abandoning Google.
|
| So the answer is "No, unless you are a monopoly, and even
| then don't push your luck."
| thayne wrote:
| > because customer loyalty isn't necessarily a thing these
| days.
|
| Probably because so many companies have burned that loyalty for
| short term gains. It isn't worth being loyal to a company if at
| any time they can decide to throw those loyal customers under a
| bus to make a quick buck.
| AmazingTurtle wrote:
| To be fair, he searched for "laundry detergent" and sorted Name
| A-Z and was wondering why only 3M stuff appeared. Also I failed
| to comprehend this one
|
| > Of course the list of switch games isn't under Games > Nintendo
| Switch Games that would be silly.
|
| Well.. There is a list of games when you open Games > Nintento
| Switch Games. What is he complaining about?
| xigoi wrote:
| > There is a list of games when you open Games > Nintento
| Switch Games. What is he complaining about?
|
| That the list doesn't contain _all_ Nintendo Switch games that
| the site offers and there doesn't seem to be any clear reason
| why those particular 120 games were chosen.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I would really love if there was some browser built-in skinnable
| system for lists that lets the user control ordering of the list
| and information visibility on the list, also filtering and
| grouping.
|
| There should be a movement for solutions that put power in the
| hands of the user.
| croisillon wrote:
| I would try and install millions of apps on my iphone if the
| appstore was properly searchable, alas it's not and i have like
| 10 apps installed
| spcebar wrote:
| Faceting is a deceptively hard problem to solve because it
| requires understanding the features of the products within the
| categories of products within the ecosystem of products a seller
| is selling, and dividing them up based on how a customer is
| likely to be thinking about the products. If you're selling
| clothing, the customer is likely going to mean something
| different with the word "long" than they would mean if they were
| searching for foods. Within different categories of clothing the
| word "long" is going to mean different things.
| DarkSucker wrote:
| Industry, please give us good search tools like those for
| researching articles: ("fog" near "coastline") AND
| ("lighthouse"). Or that offer regular expressions so I can search
| with precision.
|
| I got used to good search tools in grad school, and then came
| Google. And ever since I've not gotten better than a result
| salad. Sometimes a tasty salad, but still a salad.
|
| And, to be complete, firms like Nerac offer good search tools,
| but you need to work with someone who performs the search for you
| (last I used them).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-26 23:01 UTC)