I’m looking for advice / help with my Amazon searches: Is there some way to refine an Amazon search so it only shows me what I want and excludes non-hits, or alternatively tells me “no matching items”.
Specifically, I’m trying to find a pair of “bifocal sunglasses with interchange lenses”. (I cycle during the day and at night, and I want a pair where I can just swap the lenses)
I’ve been searching for about an hour and am incredibly frustrated. I first searched for:* bifocal sunglasses* and they do have some, but none with interchangeable lenses. More frustrating is about 75% of my “hits” are for non-bifocal sunglasses. WTF?
Then I tried: bifocal sunglasses with interchangeable lenses, I get hits for interchange lens sunglasses with a few single lens bifocal sets down the list but none with both. (At least not in the first 6 pages of results).
I then tried multiple variations using quotes, adding “and”, “+” in parts of the search terms. I get the same results in each case regardless of any search modifiers. Very frustrating.
I checked Amazon search help and it’s useless. There is no option to sort by “relevance” only by “featured” and prices.
Sorry to say that you and the rest of us are SOL. On Amazon, there is no way to ensure that your search results will actually be what you searched for, or to exclude irrelevant results. There is no magic combination of key words or boolean search operators or filters (usually the Amazon filters throw you out of whatever department you thought you were in). I’ve complained to Amazon about this several times (e.g., searching for a kitchen pot and getting results that included stuff like scented candles), and their ‘explanation’ boils down to “our search engine does whatever it wants, and you the customer have no control over it.” It’s why I canceled my Prime membership.
I think a big part of the problem is that A)Amazon purposely adds in things that it knows you aren’t looking for. Either to force you to see more items or because people are paying to get higher in the results and B)sellers are adding (incorrect) keywords to their items so you check out their page knowing it’s not what you’re looking for.
Just last week I was looking for a heated blanket. Nearly every single combination of Heated, Electric and Blanket I used brought up loads of hits for regular blankets. Often times it was simply the price that tipped me off that I wasn’t looking at an electric blanket. They know exactly what they’re doing.
This happens quite frequently. Third party sellers are responsible for putting the correct information in for their items, and that is not an easy task. If they do not do so and put in too little information, put in incorrect information, or match some other seller who has put in wrong info, it’s going to be very difficult to search for those items.
I too have complained to them to no avail, that when I search within digital music it will return results for physical media. At least I have never found it bury digital when it is available but I don’t like getting my hopes up of immediately buying something when I see the results only to be disappointed when I see the details.
One of my big problems, also something I’ve complained about, is all the non-prime or non-free/2day/1day/same day delivery thing that show up when I click those boxes. It seems odd that it would be something wrong with the search function since that should be the easiest part of the algorithm so I can only assume they purposely pepper in incorrect results for whatever reason.
And all of this doesn’t even get into all the hijinks that third party sellers pull. A lot of which desperately needs to be cracked down on. Third party sellers already have such a bad reputation that most people avoid them and the legit/good/responsible ones are going to be driven right back to ebay.
Amazon’s search has apparently deliberately set to “wide” mode.
I was searching for a toilet flush lever last week. No matter what terms I used or what I clicked on on the side menu, I still got tons of unrelated stuff. E.g., drain covers which aren’t even toilet parts. Page after page after page of mostly unrelated stuff.
I wanted a chrome one. Selected that as a “color”. Now I’m down to just two hits. And doesn’t include any of the ones I had already come across.
Similar stuff is happening with Google. I suspect that they are using AI more and more and AI is stupid. It just figures out stuff that is linked together in some odd and inexplicable way. Humans don’t think that way and neither should search engines.
And, for whatever reason, once you’ve actually purchased an item, they feel the need to show it to you over and over, as if you’re planning to start a collection.
The other day I went to the page for one of those little silicone steam diverters so that keep the steam from blowing all over your cabinets. This morning, I had 20 of them littered all over Amazon’s home page suggesting I might be interested in them. It strikes me as bizarre that they’ll cover my front page in tons of the same item as one I already bought when they could be using that space to show me things I haven’t bought.
Targeted advertising. The algorithm probably isn’t programmed to take the fact into account that you’ve already purchased the item. What it is programmed to do is track what you’ve looked at and push paid ads for the same or similar products.
I don’t pay attention to the recommended items on Amazon, but at CVS, but if I buy shampoo, the back of my two foot long receipt has a sponsored coupon for shampoo, soap, lotion and other bath related items.
Another thing that Amazon and other sites do is put a sponsored product at the top of the page of your searched item. It’s usually not the highest rated or lowest priced, so I just ignore them.
The algorithm probably isn’t programmed to take the fact into account that you’ve already purchased the item. What it is programmed to do is track what you’ve looked at and push paid ads for the same or similar products.
I don’t pay attention to the recommended items on Amazon, but at CVS, but if I buy shampoo, the back of my two foot long receipt has a sponsored coupon for shampoo, soap, lotion and other bath related items.
Another thing that Amazon and other sites do is put a sponsored product at the top of the page of your searched item. It’s usually not the highest rated or lowest priced, so I just ignore them.
Edit: I’ve always found this funny, but it must work as they do it. When you buy a car, used or new from a dealership, you start receiving emails and snail mail about the great buys that have on cars, often for less than you’ve just paid!
I would pit Amazon search if I could. I was looking for a 12V 4A power supply for a Jetson single board computer for a machine learning project one of my staff is working on.
Not only did it give me a ton of results for 5V power supplies, it gave me results that had nothing to do with power supplies.
It makes some sense for something consumable like soap. But I really don’t need more than the one trashcan I just bought. Besides, it seems like it would be so simple for them to realize that the item they’re basing your ads on has already been purchased. If you even go back to that same item, it’ll say right at the top that you already bought it, so they’ve made purchase history easily available to at least some other parts of the site.
That seems to be part of dealerships. If you email them, for any reason at all, you’ll be added to their list. IME, the only way to get removed from their list is to annoy them more. In the past I’ve A)called them, on the phone, every single time they’ve emailed me and B)replied to their email, dozens of times (with CC/BCC) asking to be removed.
The best solution I ever came up with, however, is to set up an email account when I’m car shopping that will be abandoned as soon as I have the keys in my hand. I’ve got virtually no reason to receive any emails from them after the transaction is over. I don’t need to rate my sales person, I know when I need oil changes etc…
It basically comes down to they know their recommend purchases work pretty well, and there isn’t enough benefit to spending resources on fixing it so it doesn’t recommend you keep buying trash cans.
Ad placement makes money for the website. It’s a circular cycle (is that an oxymoron?). Advertiser has their ad placed 10,000 times and sells 500 units. The advertiser isn’t told or doesn’t care that 1000 of those ads were targeted to those who already bought the product. All they know is they sold 500 units. Amazon says, “Hey, if you increase your placement to 20,000 times, you’ll sell 1000 units!” and the advertiser agrees. Rinse and repeat.
As enalzi stated, even with the heavily targeted advertising techniques available today, there’s a point where narrowing down the target isn’t cost effective. It’s still a shotgun approach, just a smaller spread.
Don’t get me wrong, whatever Amazon is doing, they’re doing it right. I’m not questioning their decision so much as asking why.
Though them recommending things you’ve just purchased happens regularly enough that I’ve seen at least two comedians mention it in their act or on the social media page.
As others said, use Google to search Amazon. You can actually search Amazon for the exact model number of what you want and it won’t even give you that item as the first result. Seaching for toner cartridges is a minefield.
For toner, envelopes and other office consumables, I tend to just go back into my purchase history and buy the same thing from the same seller. Sometimes it’s easier to pay an extra dollar or two than end up envelopes that are little bit shorter in one dimension or toner cartridges that don’t quite work right.
Thanks for all your feedback. I guess the good news is that at least I’m not nuts or incompetent, other people are having this issue as well.
The other good news is that if Amazon becomes so unwieldy that buyers stop using it, then hopefully they’ll wake up and address this issue.
As far as using Google search first, that was only partially helpful. When I drilled down into the results, there was only one pair of sunglasses that actually met the search criteria. (They looked quite good, but they were designed for shooters, so the magnification was at the top of the glasses = not good for cycling). The rest of the hits were exactly the same as Amazon: either regular sunglasses with interchangeable lenses or bifocal sunglasses.
**Question 1) **Several of you commented that part of the problem is the “3rd party sellers product description”. However when I look at the text they use, I don’t see anything about “bifocal” in their description. Are there hidden description fields that users don’t see?
**Question 2) **Several of you said you complained to Amazon: How did you do that? I looked all around the site for some sort of “contact us” box & could find nothing.