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Comment by CuriousRose | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me that companies like AirBnB get huge valuations and user bases when the fundamental feature of searching for listings is phenomenally atrocious.

- Paginated results that reset and call an API for new results when the map is moved (even to a subset of the initial call such as in a zoom).

- Inability to change pagination size.

- Inability to hide listings you aren't interested in.

- Map only displaying listings on the current page, which change dramatically per page.

- Page changes (the thing you do more of than comparing options), take way too long.

Maybe it's a real-estate website related issue as the two main property sites in Australia (Domain and RealEstate) as also garbage. I have a feeling it's also designed this way to prevent scraping.

Can someone at AirBnB please sort these basic QoL things out.

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Did you notice that the search at Amazon is not that precise? It's not because they could not make it more precise. Equally, did you notice how milk and bread are in the opposite end of the grocery store? It's not because they could not put them next to the entrance. I suspect that a similar factor can be in play here.

As of slowness, I suspect they don't have a DC an Australia, so your packets need to travel across Pacific and back.

I also suspect that their web site already brings enough customers, and a serious rework to make it more usable won't bring in many more customers, and any more money. Investing in that is likely a poor business decision. I bet their resources mostly go to protection from fraud, legal battles, and other non-engineering concerns.

I understand your point, nobody is claiming that separating the bread and milk is a particularly good experience either and while it probably makes more money in a physical store where you want to buy multiple options at once, this doesn't apply to AirBnB with a single item checkout. The search at Amazon almost always gets me what I want on the first page, which is the desired behaviour almost everywhere to reduce friction to checkout. Why would I want to increase user frustration and bounce rate on a single product checkout?

I imagine significantly reducing database calls and blob downloads due to short-sighted pagination behaviour would result in significant cost saving, reduce bounce rate and increase conversions.

There are even more search issues that sometimes make it unusable:

- Impossible to filter / search by rating, which is a must-have if I am going to travel, no way I am risking staying at a first-time host, a lot of horror stories from forgetting bedsheets to outright scams.

- There is no way to see the precise location, which is understandable for safety in some places (mostly listings in areas with "single-family" similar neighborhoods, like Orlando suburbs, you don't want to advertise your home as "available"). But, in some cities, for example, in Rio, a large radius can make you uncertain if the apartment listing is beachside or in the favela's entrance.

As somebody traveling with small children, what's even more frustrating is that AirBnB seems to have a tag "Well reviewed by families", but refuses to allow you to search for it. Which means using more indirect filters (like "has a baby bed") and clicking through dozens of listings to find one with that tag. I get why they do it (looking at more listing is great for them), but I feel like they're wasting my time and it sucks, researching holidays is a frustrating timesink as it is, and they make it worse.

Nobody is incentivized to fix those things, so they don't get fixed. Nobody ever got promoted for making small UI tweaks.

Much better to spend years on an expensive redesign that somehow makes the user experience worse. Now that's how you get ahead.

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