# How can Amazon still have such suckass search a quarter century and billions into it? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 29, 2021, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583 "2021-09-29T15:49:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Tired\_and\_Cranky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a87d85/32.png) [@Tired\_and\_Cranky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tired_and_Cranky)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2021, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/41 "2021-09-30T14:21:02Z")
> [@tofor](#): > > No doubt it is the way it is because they make more money with a bad search, suggesting all sorts of things you aren’t looking for. This. > [@tofor](#): > > If I’m searching for part # 255S3129 (the burner for my specific stove) I’m really not going to be interested in burners for other stoves! Right now, I have in my house the wrong oven knob for my stove and the wrong filters for my vacuum because of reliance on searches like that. > [@mixdenny](#): > > I find it works better if you use Google when you are not in Amazon. Just search on Google for “Amazon 5 inch round mirror” I used to do this but now I just search every site indexed by Google. I often find better prices elsewhere and I like to support Amazon’s competitors. . > [@Dr\_Paprika](#): > > As said, I am sure Amazon knows exactly what it wants from its search. Their goal is to get you to buy stuff. I think poor search is primarily intended to increase ad sales, not sales of goods. The short story is that Amazon sold roughly $16 billion in ads last year, which is almost all profit for them. If they had a really good search engine, they would have fewer opportunities to serve up ads. If you put in a very specific search term and there were no results because Amazon didn’t have it, they couldn’t put up any ads. Instead, their search engine posts hundreds or thousands of mostly irrelevant results and you have to click on a bunch of them, Every click on a “sponsored post” is money in their pocket, regardless of whether you buy something. The truth is, Amazon does not make much if anything selling goods. According to [Amazon’s 2021 10-K](https://annualreport.stocklight.com/NASDAQ/AMZN/21583589.pdf), Sales from physical and online stores (online revenue of $197.3B, physical sales of $16.2B, but cost of sales of $233.3B) don’t make money. That is, they lost about $20 billion last year selling goods. If you add in revenue from “subscription services” ($25.2B , mostly, Amazon Prime subscriptions), this combined business made roughly $5 billion, not including the cost of Amazon Prime content (an inscrutable number, buried in $42.7 billion of “technology and content” expenses). But, their ad revenue alone was $16.2 billion. The ads they sell earn more than Amazon’s entire business of selling goods online or in stores. They run a break-even store to attract buyers, then they run a bad search engine populated with a lot of ads to keep those buyers (fruitlessly or not) clicking on the ads. It might seem counterproductive in the long run to focus on selling ads that don’t generate many sales because, presumably, advertisers would see declining value in the ads over time and pay less for them. Maybe that will happen and Amazon’s search engine will get better butit doesn’t seem to have happened yet. > [@Icarus](#): > > I write it off to inertia. A lot of what we see on the major websites is now 20+ years old. Amazon is an organization that ruthlessly and relentlessly eliminates the type of corporate inertia that stalls other companies. I don’t think this is it. > [@What\_Exit](#): > > So funny, their search is significantly better than most shopping sites. The best shopping site is Google, which effectively combines them all. Don’t search site by site. > [@eschrodinger](#): > > I truly don’t understand how Walmart has any online sales. I cannot find even the most basic product information on their site. Because once I’ve decided to buy something, Walmart might have it in stock for less. It’s happened at least a couple of times in the pandemic. And I hate Walmart. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2021, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/42 "2021-09-30T14:34:26Z")
> [@tofor](#): > > But if I search specifically for a 5" round mirror, don’t give me 13 inch triangular mirrors! I blame a lot of that on the factors @ZipperJJ listed – most of the items on Amazon don’t have complete tags of their attributes. And fwiw, I have much better luck finding what I want on Amazon than on most other sites I search. But yeah, they probably don’t actually want to optimize it. And I suppose I always start with a google search, so I’m cheating. I find the “customers who shopped this also shopped that” feature incredibly helpful on Amazon, fwiw. > [@Driver8](#): > > I don’t know about “universal” - I assumed Gmail wasn’t an outlier here and other providers would include similar functionality. Perhaps there’s more of a gap between them than I thought? Both Mac Mail (or whatever comes standard on my mac) and Outlook (the windows standard) do these things. So I think there are a lot of email solutions that would work for @Icarus ---
**Author:** ![ZipperJJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zipperjj/32/211_2.png) [@ZipperJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZipperJJ)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2021, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/43 "2021-09-30T14:50:05Z")
> [@Tired\_and\_Cranky](#): > > I used to do this but now I just search every site indexed by Google. I often find better prices elsewhere and I like to support Amazon’s competitors. . Be careful doing this, though. All those scam sellers on Amazon now have scam stores, indexed by Google. As easy as it is to become an Amazon seller it’s just as easy to set up a Shopify store with all the same stolen photos and pricing. And these stores are advertised all over Facebook as well. I was just looking to buy a replacement exhaust fan for my bathroom. I found it on a bunch of sites. One site was $10 less than the others. The site looked incredibly legit. Paypal pay! Google Pay! I was just about ready to check out when I decided to do my regular check and see what the About Us page looked like. As soon as I read it, I knew it was a scam: > [@](#): > > Our goal is to serve You with the best customer service every day. We are providing every client, from home owner to contractors, with excellent customer service and we have the best prices and highest quality products on the market. As a company, we act with integrity and loyalty, we think that quality service begins with quality people. Our sale staffs are knowledgeable and professional, our sales department and customer support associates are eager to serve our valued customers. Customer service is our no. 1 priority. > We are here to serve, each day we open our business to exceed your expectations. Although we are in the beginning stages of our adventure with sales hardware, we are fresh, enthusiastic and full of energy. We can serve our customers better than any other ever did. A generic About Us page with some awkward wording, which when put into Google shows up on other sites verbatim. Busted “PayPal Verified”, Instagram and Twitter links. No FAQ, no shipping info. Just a boilerplate copy of some other site. The contact email is for some other site. I see at least one of these a week, usually from my friends who were googling to buy something that looked cool or that was cheaper than anywhere else. I do my usual check and always find it to be a scam. ISTM that stores that show up as Google Shopping links tend to be more trustworthy than ones that just show up in Google search results. Google Shopping must do some vetting. Anyway, as I said…it’s the Wild West out there. There’s scammers around every corner when it comes to shopping. You need to be diligent and not just buy what is the cheapest priced version of what you’re looking for. Online shopping is a bounty but now the cup overfloweth. With scammers. ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2021, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/44 "2021-09-30T14:52:21Z")
Yes, this makes sense. But it does not change the conclusion Amazon has good reasons for doing things the way they do. ---
**Author:** ![AlsoNamedBort](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alsonamedbort/32/3213_2.png) [@AlsoNamedBort](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AlsoNamedBort)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2021, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/45 "2021-09-30T15:01:59Z")
> [@Stoid](#): > > But others: “sort by” magically ADDS another 15,000 results to the 2,000 results you started with? And usually doesn’t actually work anyway? WTF? I believe the reason for that is that there’s no reason to return 15,000 results the first time. If I search for “iphone”, I’m not going to go to result 2001 to get what I need, so why would Amazon get them all to me? But if I sort “price: low to high”, now it’s going to pull up a bunch of extra crap so it can get all the cheap stuff first. ---
**Author:** ![Yookeroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yookeroo/32/323_2.png) [@Yookeroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yookeroo)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2021, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/46 "2021-09-30T23:43:50Z")
> [@ZipperJJ](#): > > Amazon even has sellers that switch up their products within their product page. Check out reviews sometimes…they’ll be for a completely different product than you’re looking at. I’ve seen this a lot with iPhone cables. Always check the reviews, if only to make sure the rating is for the item you’re looking to purchase. ---
**Author:** ![Tired\_and\_Cranky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a87d85/32.png) [@Tired\_and\_Cranky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tired_and_Cranky)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2021, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/47 "2021-10-01T17:43:10Z")
> [@ZipperJJ](#): > > Be careful doing this, though. Fair enough. I generally order from big names, like Amazon, Target, and Walmart, or smaller companies I am familiar with. Before I take a flyer on a small company (like for auto parts) I google reviews. And I am generally using Google Shopping. ---
**Author:** ![ZipperJJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zipperjj/32/211_2.png) [@ZipperJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZipperJJ)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2021, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/48 "2021-10-01T17:47:47Z")
> [@Tired\_and\_Cranky](#): > > Fair enough. I generally order from big names, like Amazon, Target, and Walmart, or smaller companies I am familiar with. Before I take a flyer on a small company (like for auto parts) I google reviews. And I am generally using Google Shopping. Yeah that’s usually how I go too. I’ve found a few nice smaller online retailers that I like for different stuff that way as well. The aforementioned part I needed, I ended up buying on [supplyhouse.com](http://supplyhouse.com) which I had purchased from before. They ship holy-moly-super-fast! ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2021, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/49 "2021-10-01T17:55:58Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > So funny, their search is significantly better than most shopping sites. > Try Lowes, Home Depot, Sears, Best Buy, Target or WalMart as a comparison. > … > I want to know what benchmark they’re being compared to? Maybe a site with a much narrower array of products? I suspect it’s hard to design a good search function that works for a vast array of different kinds of products, from thousands of different sources. ---
**Author:** ![ZipperJJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zipperjj/32/211_2.png) [@ZipperJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZipperJJ)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2021, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/50 "2021-10-05T19:35:25Z")
There’s a related discussion about Facebook ads going on in another thread. > [@Facebook ads for scam products - I hates them, I does](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/facebook-ads-for-scam-products-i-hates-them-i-does/951860/29): > > Why would anyone with working brain cells even click on an ad link, let alone an ad link from Facebook? It’s related because it talks about the shitty products in ads there, which are the same shitty products in Amazon search results, and those Google search results I mentioned, and on Wal Mart’s site too. Someone linked to a WaPo article on the topic. Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall but I’m a subscriber now (thanks to that link lol) > **[A flood of unknown products is making online shopping impossible](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/04/online-shopping/)** > > Mysterious brands are flooding shopping sites and social media ads, making it difficult to tell the real from the low-quality. > [@](#): > > Most of us buying online already know how to look out for the basics — whether that’s bad graphic design, low prices that are too good to be true or poor reviews. But those signals are becoming outdated. > > The advent of fast fashion and third-party sellers have made low price points not just common, but expected. And reviews on sites such as Amazon are regularly gamed by sellers flooding their pages with paid reviews. Shopify, a service for setting up easy online storefronts, lets almost anyone quickly whip up a professional-looking online shop. > > So a shopper also has to look for subtle signs such as too many reviews that are overly positive or use repetitive language. Search for the origin of a product photo to make sure it’s not stolen or provided to multiple sellers by a factory. > > “Normal consumers have not been educated to dig this deep,” said Saoud Khalifah, CEO of [Fakespot](http://fakespot.com/), a browser tool that grades online brands based on signals like a suspicious number of positive reviews. Khalifah launched it after his own botched purchase from Amazon — a supplement that ended up being sawdust in a bottle. Check out [fakespot.com](http://fakespot.com). I’ve used it in the past for Amazon products but most of the time I come away frustrated knowing that everything I want is “probably fake”. ☹ ---
**Author:** ![Stoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stoid/32/272_2.png) [@Stoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stoid)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2021, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/51 "2021-10-05T21:47:26Z")
Has anyone else experienced “Everything is a Watch”? Goes like this: see ad for cool product ata really great price, almost guaranteed to be $19.99 or $29.99. Order. Wait. Receive the nebulous gray plastic package from China. My icemaker turned out to be a watch. Then my cool useful sidetable arrived…as a watch! Finally, the amazing bedlift support is actually…well, no, it wasn’t a watch, it turned out to be a hideous bejeweled compact mirror. ---
**Author:** ![Mama\_Zappa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/71e660/32.png) [@Mama\_Zappa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mama_Zappa)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2021, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/52 "2021-10-05T22:42:36Z")
> [@ZipperJJ](#): > > Amazon even has sellers that switch up their products within their product page. Check out reviews sometimes…they’ll be for a completely different product than you’re looking at. The sellers will replace an item with a lot of positive reviews with some new, unrelated item and get themselves better search results based on the ratings of the other product. Whee! Niiiice - and I’ve seen this myself. I went back to look at a review I’d written of some earbuds. I used the link from my order history - and saw something completely different. Ditto a few other things. And sometimes they’ll have a bunch of different options on the same product page - which are completely different items (different types of laptop fans; that’s one I recall) so you have no clue which of them is meant. I suspect Amazon either deliberately allows / encourages this, or can’t be arsed to respond to “incorrect information” reports. Their flagging of purchases as “sensitive” is fun too. I was looking up my own review history once and saw a few items listed that would not be shown on my reviewer page due to the sensitive nature of the items. Now, this was not anything like sex toys or incontinence garb or anything. I truly do not care who knows that I bought a sling for my injured wrist, nor scar-reducing silicone strips for the same. And it’s baffling to me why they flagged a TOTE BAG in that category. Dunno what they thought I’d be carrying in that thing. ---
**Author:** ![Heracles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heracles/32/487_2.png) [@Heracles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heracles)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2021, 12:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/53 "2021-10-11T12:26:33Z")
> [@Stoid](#): > > But others: “sort by” magically ADDS another 15,000 results to the 2,000 results you started with? That’s actually a smart way to program a search engine. 99% of people will select among the first N results and won’t bother looking at the rest. So you design a search engine that returns only the 2 \* N results with the best chance of being what the user is looking for based on some complex algorithm. Another algorithm spits out an approximation like “2113 results” (which most people won’t try counting). Search results are returned by a different server from one time to the next, to even out the load, and each server may be working with a slightly different copy of the entire catalog. That’s sufficient to service 75 million queries a second. And it’s basically what Google does, too, although its algorithms are probably better. If somebody actually wants sorted results (“oh, you want the _search_ search!”), then the search gets redone by the “exhaustive search” algorithm, on yet another server, which doesn’t work quite the same way, and the resulting list (which contains 17220 items after all, sorry not sorry) gets sorted and shown. (AFAIK, you can’t ask Google Search to sort the results.) ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2021, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/54 "2021-10-12T01:47:00Z")
Ebay has a good search. Proper boolean ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2021, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/55 "2021-10-16T17:56:20Z")
The “newer version of this item” results that show up occasionally are nonsense more often than not. (No, a wall charger (and nothing else) is _not_ a “newer version” of a combination wall charger and portable battery pack.) ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2021, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/56 "2021-10-19T03:05:10Z")
> [@Mama\_Zappa](#): > > Their flagging of purchases as “sensitive” is fun too. I was looking up my own review history once and saw a few items listed that would not be shown on my reviewer page due to the sensitive nature of the items. Now, this was not anything like sex toys or incontinence garb or anything. I truly do not care who knows that I bought a sling for my injured wrist, nor scar-reducing silicone strips for the same. And it’s baffling to me why they flagged a TOTE BAG in that category. Dunno what they thought I’d be carrying in that thing. How do they know you weren’t planning to keep sensitive items in a tote bag? 😃 They might consider that plausible, because this is the same search engine that told me that an instance of this sort of product was the [#3 most popular bathroom item](https://www.amazon.com/VIVOHOME-Decorative-Firewood-Storage-Outdoor/dp/B0972G1ZFC/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fire+wood+holder+indoors&qid=1634612493&sr=8-9) the day I looked for toilet paper holders so clearly they’re driven by whimsy more than logic (or have a childish idea of what a “log” is…!) There’s an [MSN article from today](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/did-amazon-lie-to-congress-lawmakers-give-ceo-andy-jassy-e2-80-98final-opportunity-e2-80-99-to-correct-record/ar-AAPFVth?ocid=uxbndlbing) about Amazon manipulating the search returns, by the way. And it turns out that the postscript to the story [ZipperJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZipperJJ) showed us is that Amazon actually owns a lot of the knock-off brands. ---
**Author:** ![Mama\_Zappa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/71e660/32.png) [@Mama\_Zappa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mama_Zappa)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2021, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/57 "2021-10-19T05:56:20Z")
> [@elfkin477](#): > > the [#3 most popular bathroom item](https://www.amazon.com/VIVOHOME-Decorative-Firewood-Storage-Outdoor/dp/B0972G1ZFC/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fire+wood+holder+indoors&qid=1634612493&sr=8-9) the day Somehow, almost everything I look at is "#1 in " some oddball category, or “Amazon’s Choice”. Often it’s a very weird, highly specific description such as "purple cooler with zipper and outside pocket’ or something equally specific. And yeah, the “newer version” is often just a DIFFERENT version, generally more expensive, often OLDER. The fact that they keep old reviews when the item is now something completely different seems to be a policy of deliberately allowing scams. And sometimes they’ll have a boatload of very different items (like very different models of laptop fans, that’s one I remember well) under the same “item” - so you have no CLUE what the reviews are for. ---
**Author:** ![tofor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tofor/32/13727_2.png) [@tofor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tofor)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2021, 12:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/58 "2021-10-19T12:33:41Z")
> [@Mama\_Zappa](#): > > And sometimes they’ll have a boatload of very different items (like very different models of laptop fans, that’s one I remember well) under the same “item” - so you have no CLUE what the reviews are for. There is an option, sometimes, if you dig far enough, to filter reviews by “type” or something where occasionally you can see just the relevant reviews. ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2022, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/59 "2022-07-23T23:44:39Z")
Amazon finally wakes up. Sorta. I got an email that they want me to participate in a survey to make their search engine better. (Yes, I triple checked that it’s actually Amazon) 1. Why ask customers? Can’t they figure it out on their own or bring in some, ya know, experts? 2.(c/p from email) “This survey is hosted on our behalf by an external party, Qualtrics, so the link does not lead to our website. **This survey is testing a mobile experience, so it might be best to complete on your mobile.** ” So you think the desktop experience is either near perfect or inconsequential? ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2022, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583/60 "2022-07-23T23:56:11Z")
I believe Amazon to be a well led and visionary company. I believe Amazon already largely has the search engine that it wants and knows people do not see it as perfect. The search engine customers might prefer, however, may not serendipitously lead you to items that you actually buy. I think Amazon knows a lot about what customers will buy even though I think digital marketing in general is much overhyped. However, Amazon has more and better proprietary data and attracts knowledgeable people. It isn’t a third party IT company trying to persuade your small business to use more digital marketing. Although successful, and often very efficient, Amazon has the advantage of both being the manufacturer or distributor of many “Amazon Basics” goods in addition to running the marketplace. Presumably this gives extra revenue streams that might not be explored if the search engine focuses too much on exactly what you requested. I have occasionally been flabbergasted at the speediness of delivery, much more so than the number of times things just didn’t materialize. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-amazon-still-have-such-suckass-search-a-quarter-century-and-billions-into-it/951583.md?page=4)