How can Amazon still have such suckass search a quarter century and billions into it?

ZipperJJ · October 5, 2021, 7:35pm

There’s a related discussion about Facebook ads going on in another thread.

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)

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 But those signals are becoming outdated.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, 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. 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”.