If anything, it seems like the likes of Amazon are making it harder to sort and filter, using dark patterns to direct you to their preferred products.
What I mean is, let’s say I want to buy an alarm clock. I don’t want a cheap one neither a luxury one. I just want to buy the medium alarm clock from usual brands you find in store but I don’t know, for a given type of product, which are the usual, reliable brands. Well, Amazon now being Aliexpress with a margin, it’s impossible. Just typing "alarm clock" in the search bar will submerge you with low quality products from temporary Chinese brands.
I tried searching for a cordless handheld vacuum on amazon recently. All the 5.0 reviews are AI generated unverified purchases. And then just below that, lots of RANDOMWORD generic chinese "brands".
The reputable brands you might actually buy are hidden in the noise of it all.
1. Reddit's default sorting algorithm was (and perhaps still is) based on this
2. Google's internal Q&A tool, Dory[1], used it to rank questions to ask to the leadership during the "open" mic sessions.
NOTE: please don't do the same mistake.
The math of the algorithm ensures that controversial questions never get asked, since the algorithm approximated the upvotes/downvotes ratio, not votes/views ratio.
The latter was not used because, IIRC, counting impressions on an internal site was too "technically challenging".
This, in my opinion, defies the entire point of an internal Q&A, which is to address hot topics before they spill out and become an issue.
(I don't think I'm spilling any tea talking about how Q&A in Google was run five years ago; there's no secret sauce there. It was natural to ask "which questions make it to the top", and the answer was the link to the article we're discussing. Google considered it to be fair).