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Comment by resolutebat | Hacker News Reader

Alibaba was fast moving, fearless and aggressively deep tech, you don't survive the world of Chinese e-commerce if you aren't. They were decapitated and neutered by the Chinese state when they started to show signs of upending the existing order, specifically building a competing financial system (Alipay/Ant) and daring to call out Chinese economic orthodoxy.

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From what I heard from engineers working for Alibaba, my understanding is that they are fighting with their own bureaucracy structure for quite long time to make any effective decision, at same time facing fierce compitition from JD and PDD. At some stage they released new prodect to compete with PDD every few months while still keep losing in their core e-commerce bussiness till now. All these were before government cracking down their financial business.

Most of the people I know in the industry think Alibaba is one of the least efficient big tech company in China compare to e.g Tencent, Baidu, Bytedance, Huawei. They all have somewhat similar bureaucracy burden as big corp but not at the level of Alibaba. Their problem is much complex than pointing the finger at Chinese government to explain everything.

Is that why the search has gone to absolute crap? I’ve switched to Amazon basically for everything I used to get from AE because of the anti search / advertising search. I’d rather pay more and not waste the time.

I heard they switched to fully use a recommending system for search (don't know how it works today but feels like that's still the case), which means there is there is no real search happening and you query is used as a hint, not a search query (which relativeness matters more).

At that time PDD is promoting the idea you buy what they think you will buy. PDD's search is barely functioning at that time and their bussiness model is solely relying on recommending system.

Though I'm not sure how much Alibaba's decision is affected by PDD because the story I heard is more driven by their internal politics. I feel like that's really a weird product decision for Alibaba and to me doesn't make a lot of sense.

That explains so much! Alibaba search randomly adds items I've previously bought to totally unrelated searches, so it does feel like a bad recommender system.

What is PDD?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinduoduo

PDD (PinDuoDuo) is the owner of Temu, which is kinda but not exactly a western version of PDD.

100 vendors selling the same thing each at a different price but if you search for it you get only one as the 200th result.

I spend many hours trying to make sense of it. Usually I fail and buy elsewhere.

Truly an impressive feet of stupidity.

Someone should do a paid search engine for it. $50 per month seems well worth the preservation of sanity.

By deep tech I thinking things more like making your own chips rather than running a ponzi scheme :-D

Anyway. If you listen to the Tsai interview he seems more concerned about US regulators than Chinese.

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