It used to function reasonably well as a means of searching for an item Amazon sells. Which should be its main function.
But Amazon seems to have adopted a new principle. Rather than listen to its customers asking about a product they want to buy, Amazon used its search feature as a means of telling its customers what they should be buying.
It started with the use of ads for “sponsored” products. If you go to the search engine and enter that you’re looking for The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, Amazon will return results that begin with Colleen Hoover’s most recent novel.
And it’s getting worse. Even when I specifically put that I’m looking for books in the search terms, Amazon will give me a list of kindle products. If I specify I’m looking for a dvd, it’ll give me a list of prime products. In some cases, Amazon has refused to admit that the product I’m searching for even exists in a physical format.
It’s getting to the point where I’m going to start doing my online shopping at Walmart’s website.
Something is wrong with your browser or preferences. I just did a search on Amazon for:
the talented mr ripley book
Which Amazon auto-completed for me when I was halfway done typing. And I so far count 15 results of the actual book in one form or another before I got to another product (which was Ripley Under Ground, the sequel).
Again this doesn’t appear to be an Amazon problem.
Accepting that your description is accurate, then it’s not entirely true simply to say that their search has gone downhill. From their perspective, it’s probably working better than ever.
(Also, I read this hack somewhere: to quickly find something on Amazon, don’t search with Amazon; use Google and include the “site:amazon.com” key.)
Amazon is terrible. I want to buy a pair of women’s pants for my wife. So I search for women’s pants, and I get men’s clothes as well. I click on the women’s department only, Still get men’s clothes, including shirts, etc along with women’s clothes.
Brands are worse. If I search for a specific brand, my results are filled with Chinese knockoffs, and probably not the branded item. If I search for a specific type of paint, I get all paint plus a lot of things only vaguely paint-related. I need airbrush paint, not a set of painter’s coveralls, thank you.
It can be so bad that sonetimes I give up on searching on Amazon and do a Google search of the Amazon site to find what I’m looking for. But Google searches are also getting bad.
I will say that Amazon has been pissing me off lately. When I’m on my phone (where I do a majority of shopping for their site) and I try to zoom in on an image it crashes my browser most of the time. I need to close it and reload. This never used to be a problem. This doesn’t happen on my PC but I don’t want to only use my PC for shopping.
Also, some of the time I’m trying to do this, I’m asking my wife’s opinion on an item and want to zoom in on a feature or make it easier for her to see an item. So I have to be on my phone to show her.
I dunno, maybe having a desktop computer and a 24” monitor on my lap with a keyboard and mouse when I’m sitting on my couch downstairs is a bit awkward?
I prefer keeping all that on my desk.
If your online store won’t work on a mobile browser, you’re not doing a very good job. This is 2024.
That’s exactly right. Responsive design that works on all devices has been a thing for a decade now. There is no excuse for the front end of a multibillion dollar corporation to have basic bugs.
I think the problem here is that our goals as customers are not aligning with Amazon’s goals as a vendor. These get too much money selling the cheap knock-offs that they are willing to look the other way as vendors game the system.
There is also no excuse for a pair of women’s pants to have this title: “Women’s Men’s Pants Clothes skirts shoes household gift clothing coats outerwear sleepwear” Of course this is SEO nonsense, but the fact that the SEO clowns have to pollute the titles so badly that it’s hard sometimes to tell what you are looking at is a failing of Amazon’s metadata structures and policies.
I have found it to be really insane. I search for a “wood whatchit” and get page after page of plastic, glass, metal whatchits. The side menu for selecting material never turns up when I do this type of search either.
I want a package of screws of a certain size. The algorithm only sees “screws” and returns a ton of things that don’t match.
They have sold their soul to the worst of the Chinese crap makers and you no longer even see quality products in many categories. Products that have had the “similar product” replacement with tons of fake reviews are at the top. E.g., I was looking at TV antenna boosters. Two identical products get recommened. Fake reviews. Some of the 5-star reviews are for some DVD thing. Other five-star reviews start with “Wow!” in a bunch of different languages.
And on and on.
I used to do a search via Google with “site:amazon.com” added and got better results. But now Google has run so far off the rails you end up in a different county.
I do see this issue frequently. I’ll be very specific in what I’m looking for and I’ll get results that mostly ignore what I’m asking for. Like, say I want an item that has a USB-C connection, it will give me a bunch of results with USB-A and maybe one USB-C. Why do I bother being so careful when it’s going to say, “fuck it, buy this instead”.
Yeah, I have the same problem - I ask for a specific brand of product to replace the current one I have, and if I’m not careful, I get a knockoff version that doesn’t fit all the other associated products that go with it (that I already have). At least when I go to “buy again” I can buy the same thing I bought before - which is usually what I want.
There have been times when something I was looking at the day before somehow disappears from the results when I search for it the next day. This has happened enough times I’ve learned to put stuff on my wish list anytime I think I might be interested in later on.
Is it possible that my ad blocker is suppressing them? Let me check.
…Hmm, well I get sponsored links now. Not the results you’re seeing, but I now see The Talented Mr. Ripley on DVD as a sponsored link, and right under that a baseball cap by some company named “Capiche”. Those are the 10th and 11th results on the page after 9 different variations of the actual book. Then 5 more variations of the book (these include book collections with the book in them) before showing the sequel book, then afterwards 5 completely unrelated books (I guess a similar genre but different authors). Those unrelated books are also sponsored links.
So two lessons here; one is that search results clearly vary from person to person. Secondly, get yourself a good ad blocker. (I mean, why don’t you have one already?) Amazon really sucks a lot more once I turned my blocker off.
I wonder how much of this is really their seatch engine and how much it’s them choosing not to police vendors who post BS priduct data and thereby fool the search engine right under Amazon’s deliberately blind nose. To murder two metaphors.
It’s done that off and on for the past several years. Many of you know that I, a 3rd party vendor, was kicked off the site last May, and I didn’t find out why until November: that a hacker tried to order gift cards with my account, and instead of telling me, this is how THEY dealt with it.
Bye-bye, Amazon!
I still go on it to list items for the library account I manage, and when I was there on Monday, it was doing the same thing, and also cutting off the last letter or two of whatever I would enter in the search engine.
I DON’T WANT TO ORDER LULAROE KNOCKOFF WOMEN’S SHIRTS! I WANT TO LIST RARE BOOKS ON YOUR ACCOUNT!
II just looked for “Oppenheimer bluray”. I get everything BUT. Including a book called “Fucking History”? And the Stanley Kubrick Diaries. Oh, they’ll gladly help me stream it, but buy it? As far as the search shows, it does not exist. Not in DVD either.
A few years ago Amazon was suggesting unrelated “adult themed” items (both books and other products) in my searches. I contacted customer service and made it very clear that I objected to seeing anything in that category. I don’t know what they did, but it hasn’t happened since.
