The Reason Your Amazon Searches Are Returning More Confusing Results Than Ever | Hacker News Reader

The Reason Your Amazon Searches Are Returning More Confusing Results Than Ever

wsj.com

11 pointsUnited85713 comments

The author takes Amazon at its word, and that is a mistake.

The main reason 'search' on Amazon has gone downhill, is not because Amazon is valiantly battling an army of pesky outside vendors.

The smoking gun on Amazon is that it haphazardly inserts its own knock-off products within search results. If Amazon cared even slightly about search quality, it wouldn't insert $5 shoes above $200 shoes at the top of a list sorted by price descending.

Search is getting worse on most FAANG-like companies: Amazon is worse, Google, famously, is worse, Youtube is worse, and on and on.

A few companies now dominate their respective online markets, and users lack the knowledge and stamina to investigate alternatives.

So the main reason search is getting worse is because companies like Amazon feel like they can serve the most profitable search results to their users without attrition. Where else would customers go?

https://www.sciencetechniz.com/2022/06/amazon-says-it-employ... (appears to be the same article, without paywall)

Interesting... It's the same article, but someone else is claiming authorship of it. The WSJ article was written by Christopher Mims of the WSJ, while this one claims to have be written by Oskar Hartmannov (all the articles on that site seem to have his name on them).

Yes, the site is sketchy, but it was the only un-paywalled version I found after looking long and hard (as a non-Japanese speaker, it's not every day I find myself at https://search.yahoo.co.jp which is how I located the link)

You can get the full text of any WSJ article by going to https://archive.ph and pasting in the URL of the original article. Works for most other paywalled sites too, e.g., NY Times, Washington Post, etc.

... and it would help if people could stop posting paywalled articles

It's not the sellers that are the problem, it's the search engine. It outright ignores entire words in my search results. Try searching for "2TB SSD" and seeing all the results for 1TB drives and HDDs promoted up to the top of the results. Damn it Amazon, you should be trying to up sell me to 4TB SSDs, not down sell to tiny 1TB or smaller devices!

This! --Amazon's search engine is woeful. It often returns results that are the exact opposite of what you searched for.

It's almost as annoying as eBay's search which refuses to let me default to 'UK only' as location.

BTW. With regard to attempting to weed out fake reviews, ReviewMeta[0] seems quite useful. And, for monitoring price changes on Amazon, try CamelCamelCamel[1]

[0] https://reviewmeta.com/

[1] https://camelcamelcamel.com/

I don't think I've been pleasantly surprised by an Amazon purchase in well over five years.

I find I can only trust them with fairly basic items, things with simple manufacture. Or, obviously, books.

I used to rely on them for clothes, but this month I've tried buying and returning the same pair of shoes no less than four times. Each time they got something wrong. This included both first party and third party distribution.

In 2020 I spent a bunch of money on a webcam that simply didn't work. It seemed like the vendor had swapped the item being sold on the same listing, but had kept the earlier reviews. When I remonstrated I was offered a gift voucher to provide a five star review.

There's a whole cottage industry devoted to making money on Amazon through dodgy tactics - brushing scams, sending faulty equipment, or just plain old counterfeits.

From the perspective of this consumer at least, Amazon just aren't a trusted brand. The shoe thing was the last straw. I have no faith in any listings; it's just full of tat from China

It's definitely a reason why I see Amazon as a seller of last resort as opposed to my first choice years ago.

(If only other retailers like Best Buy choose to compete: I was looking to replace a failed hard drive with an SSD. Best Buy sold me an SSD but they chose not to sell me a 3.5 inch to 2.5 inch bracket or a SATA power adapter -- hundreds of Chinese sellers on Amazon want my business though.)

I tend to use Amazon a lot. I live in a pretty rural location. So its pretty handy to be able to order pretty much anything I want and [thanks to Prime] have it turn up within a couple of days. The 7 or 8 quid a month I pay for Prime is less than I'd spend on fuel, if I had to drive to the nearest reasonably big town, to shop for stuff.

That's not to say I don't agree with much of the sentiment of the article though. Trying to wade through the eleventy billion ident-i-kit versions of every item, to try and find the right balance between price and quality is a pain in the arse.

On the one hand there are some quality Chinese brands out there and, on the other hand, a lot of formerly quality western brands products are now visually indistinguishable from aforesaid eleventy billion Chinese clones --which makes me wonder are they all rolling of the same production line, anyway.

Fun fact: lots of manufacturers on Ali Baba will allow you to have your own logo/branding printed on their generic items, such as USB sticks, charging cables, tools etc. even with relatively small orders. So there's never been a lower bar to entry to become your own hi-tech brand.

Archive with full text of article: https://archive.ph/HRhjB

Relevant: Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox[1], especially sections III and IV

1. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

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