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Amazon has hundreds of millions of items, search at that scale is not as easy as it is for a few thousand books. E-commerce search is not the same as google se
by notyourwork 10y ago
Amazon has hundreds of millions of items, search at that scale is not as easy as it is for a few thousand books. E-commerce search is not the same as google search. Relevance by words and associations like google creates is much different than how people search when shopping/exploring.
If you have a better way to do it, Amazon is hiring and I am sure they would love to hear your ideas.
- karambahh 10y agoI am not so sure they really care about changing their search. They only recently started to change their recommendation stack, after years of using outdated technologies. I think it is somewhat similar with search. It's not so much that "it's complicated at their scale" as "It works somewhat okay, which translates into X hundreds of millions of $, so don't touch it". I know they could (and they most probably do) run A/B tests, but the thing is, how do you run MVT tests on such a large infrastructure, with such a varied catalog, etc...it all gets very complicated at their scale, just from an org perspective. Many "power users" complain about the state of Amazon search, but I doubt the average joe really cares about that. A more recent (and with a much smaller catalog) player, zalando (rocket internet) has a modular org and a modular approach to their stacks and they, apparently, change or update their tools much more often than Amazon. I am pretty sure zalando being more "agile" come from their much smaller size (both in inventory, turnover and org). Large organisations have a harder time moving than smaller ones, after all...