8 ms·

All that machine learning and they still think I would like to re-buy every product I've ever purchased.

philbarr 8y ago
Google has the same problem. I was searching for information about Apache Chainsaw the other day, and at one point forgot to put the word "apache" in as a search term. Ended up with adverts for actual chainsaws for like a week.
- alehul 8y ago
  I've always been frustrated about this as well, but I realized that it's often not Google's intention to care about this error. We're the product, willing or not, and the metric some chainsaw companies care about is simply 'searched "chainsaw"'. Google is happy to sell our eyes based on that, whether or not it converts into actual sales. In fact, for Google to deduce further and use ML to say "this user actually isn't looking for a chainsaw despite that search," and the reverse of "this user is looking for a chainsaw despite not searching it," probably wouldn't go over well for an advertiser paying for views. It turns Google into more of a black box, and would appear less trustworthy or understandable.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    Except you don’t pay Google for views, you pay for clicks. So it is in their interest to show things that convert.
    - alehul 8y ago
      Aren't there several options for what to optimize for? Such as views, clicks, conversions, etc? Additionally, aren't there filters companies can choose, such as targeting users who have searched for certain keywords?
- projectramo 8y ago
  Just be glad they didn't pair them with advertisements for face masks, and blood remover.
- sjg007 8y ago
  Interesting, maybe they need to use an LTSM..
- ric2b 8y ago
  Google gets even more ridiculous. Whenever I travel to another country they show me ads for that country, in a language I don't speak. This is on a ~10 year old account that I use daily, that has my language and country as settings, so 0 data analysis needed.
nautilus12 8y ago
My guess is that they are really bad at de-duping products. Product ids vs skus and all that jazz is historically not handled well in recommender systems, and those product not recognized as variants of already purchased products end up being the closest in the "graph" to be recommended so shoot to the top.
- elliekelly 8y ago
  But what really drives me nuts is textbooks. The data is practically handed to them with ISBNs. How hard could it possibly be for someone to tweak the algorithm so it doesn't suggest to me every edition of every text book I've ever purchased? Beyond the customer annoyance factor, this is a business issue. There is a virtually 0% chance that any textbook suggestion will be converted to a sale. That takes up valuable suggestion real estate on the user's screen and keeps me from seeing a suggestion that I might actually be interested in buying.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
carlmr 8y ago
Well it might be true for certain products. But I find it funny how they recommend me my phone or my laptop. Those aren't things you usually buy in bulk.
- simonw 8y ago
  See this thread by patio11 for a good explanation as to why this isn't as dumb as it looks: https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209 https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    > Here's a true statement: People who will in 2018 give birth to a child named Abigail are at least 5X more likely to give birth to a child in 2019 than people chosen at random. > "Naming your child Abigail can't make you more likely to get pregnant." > Again, failure to do the math. > (You get a 2X there, for free, from the observation "If you had a child named Abigail this year you are biologically capable of having children; this is not true of no less than half of humanity. Now apply same insight to childbearing age and you're already at 5X+.) This is terrible math. Nursing a child severely inhibits getting pregnant; without use of formula (or a substitute like goat's milk or what have you), it is extremely rare for children to be spaced only one year apart. It's rare enough that there's a special term for such children -- "Irish twins". If you want to swagger your conditional probability, you should know that you've got to account for that in the probability of giving birth one year given that you gave birth the year before. You can't just account for the positive adjustments, ignore the negative ones, and then say "the odds are at least as good as they would be if the existing anticorrelations didn't exist". > What's a SWAG for how often a purchase immediately goes wrong? Not right color? Fridge DOA? Shoot I mismeasured my kitchen? Wife just hates it? Call that 2%. If I fix it within a week, then 2% / 7 = 2.9e-3 probability of purchasing a new fridge. > That's a 10X relative risk. But of those listed options for "immediately goes wrong", zero of them would result in re-buying the same fridge. Wrong color, I mismeasured my kitchen, and wife hates it would cause you to buy a different fridge. Fridge DOA would cause you to refund the fridge and get a replacement. How many people, faced with the expense of a fridge that hasn't worked out, figure the best course is to just write it off and buy a second copy, hoping that it will work out better?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rubicon33 8y ago
All that machine learning and they still haven't cracked down on counterfeit goods on their platform?
- bduerst 8y ago
  That would require Amazon to prioritize customer satisfaction over bulk sales.
snowwrestler 8y ago
It's worth pointing out that this recommendation behavior is only unintelligent if it has a downside, i.e. reduces Amazon's profits. Companies (and their AIs) only care about your business transactions, not whether you're annoyed. I'm sure Amazon engineering is well aware of the jokes about their recommendation engines. But their recommendation engines are not calibrated to reduce jokes, they are calibrated to increase sales. If you only know ONE thing about a person, pinging them about that one thing might still be better than ignoring them, or offering completely random recommendations. A memorably annoying ad can work better than a boring and inoffensive one, sometimes.
- coltonv 8y ago
  That's not true, putting a product I've already ordered on my recommended list instead of something i actually want to buy is costing them money in lost sales.
  - afthonos 8y ago
    That’s assuming those are the alternatives. If the alternative is instead to show you something you’ve already ordered or nothing, the odds of you ordering again if you see the thing you’ve ordered already are small, but nonzero.
    - bduerst 8y ago
      That's a false dichotomy. There's a number of things they can show you, not just reorder or nothing. In a perfect world for targeting sales, they will predict and show you exactly what it is you want to buy next. Repurchasing is just a very lazy way of predicting what you'll buy next.
      - ojilles 8y ago
        I'm not afthonos, but I think his/her point is that they may not be able to predict exactly what it is you want to buy. (I find it super annoying, too; but that doesn't mean folks have figured out purchase reco's at scale)
cowmoo728 8y ago
https://twitter.com/girlfromblupo/status/982156453396996096?lang=en https://twitter.com/girlfromblupo/status/982156453396996096?... "Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one. Necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict. No matter how temptingly you email me, I'm not going to think, oh go on then, just one more toilet seat, I'll treat myself."
- pjscott 8y ago
  From Amazon's perspective, someone who just bought a toilet seat is much more likely than the average person to buy another one. Maybe they're doing interior furnishing work and put loads of seats on toilets. Maybe they're replacing a broken crappy plastic seat on one of their toilets with a nicer one -- might they perhaps decide to upgrade their other toilets as well? And sure, I know that these are all pretty weak signals and that the toilet seat recommendations will probably go un-clicked. But Amazon has to do the best it can with not very much information, and if they have to hawk toilet seats to a hundred people who've already bought them to find the one guy who's remodeling several bathrooms, that's probably a really good gamble for them to take.
darksaints 8y ago
This one is funny, and has a couple of obvious solutions that have been prevented due to internal politics. The short answer is that they have a couple of different recommender systems, all competing against each other internally for sales lift. One is purely based off of pageviews. When you get recommendations for something you already bought, many times it is because you looked at it, but they don't know nor care if you already bought it. In their words, it works really well and accounting for sales brings in a lot of needless complexity. Another is based off of sales. They also don't care if you already bought it because according to them, it works well. I remember trying to point out to them that for some types of products (specifically consumable products) this would work really well, but durables not so much. They claimed otherwise, that although they couldn't explain it, it was entirely common for people to rebuy things like vacuum cleaners and TVs and kitchen knives. I did a tiny bit of research to show them why they thought that, and proved with a small segment (vacuum cleaners, I believe), that after you filter for returns and replacements, that the probability of sequentially buying two of the same vacuum cleaner was effectively zero. They asked me to do it for the rest of their products, but I didn't have limitless time to spend on helping another team, especially one with a PM who was a complete dick to me for having the audacity to make a suggestion that he hadn't thought of. In all, I believe there are a dozen or so recommender services, each with their own widget. There are tons of people that think all of the recommenders have merits in some areas and drawbacks in others, and the customer would be better off if they merged concepts into a single recommender system. But they all compete for sales lift, they all think their system is better than the other systems, and they refuse to merge concepts or incorporate outside ideas because they all believe they are fundamentally superior to the other recommenders. Just a small anecdotal glimpse at the hilariously counterproductive internal politics at Amazon.
bduerst 8y ago
I know this is a joke, but you're a magnitude more likely to buy something if you've already bought it once. The whole retargeting industry is built on this, but I agree - it doesn't necessarily make it useful.
- gweinberg 8y ago
  Depends on the something. If I buy a carton of milk, I'm pretty likely to buy another before too long. If I buy a new refrigerator, probably not. Besides, the point of advertising is to get you to buy things you otherwise wouldn't. It would be pretty pointless to show me an ad that says "you love eggs, you eat them for breakfast every day, so buy some next time you're at the supermarket", because I was going to do that anyway.
  - bduerst 8y ago
    Well of course there are outlier product categories which are not repeat purchases, like engagement rings, funeral caskets, refridgerators, etc. That goes without saying, and if someone is paying to retarget those they're probably wasting their budget.
freeone3000 8y ago
Not the same product, similar products in form and function. It works great for books! Pretty good for movies! Alright for CDs! Generalize out to everything.
anonymous5133 8y ago
The ML is optimizing for revenue growth, not customer satisfaction.

Google has the same problem. I was searching for information about Apache Chainsaw the other day, and at one point forgot to put the word "apache" in as a search term. Ended up with adverts for actual chainsaws for like a week.

alehul 8y ago
I've always been frustrated about this as well, but I realized that it's often not Google's intention to care about this error. We're the product, willing or not, and the metric some chainsaw companies care about is simply 'searched "chainsaw"'. Google is happy to sell our eyes based on that, whether or not it converts into actual sales. In fact, for Google to deduce further and use ML to say "this user actually isn't looking for a chainsaw despite that search," and the reverse of "this user is looking for a chainsaw despite not searching it," probably wouldn't go over well for an advertiser paying for views. It turns Google into more of a black box, and would appear less trustworthy or understandable.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  Except you don’t pay Google for views, you pay for clicks. So it is in their interest to show things that convert.
  - alehul 8y ago
    Aren't there several options for what to optimize for? Such as views, clicks, conversions, etc? Additionally, aren't there filters companies can choose, such as targeting users who have searched for certain keywords?
projectramo 8y ago
Just be glad they didn't pair them with advertisements for face masks, and blood remover.
sjg007 8y ago
Interesting, maybe they need to use an LTSM..
ric2b 8y ago
Google gets even more ridiculous. Whenever I travel to another country they show me ads for that country, in a language I don't speak. This is on a ~10 year old account that I use daily, that has my language and country as settings, so 0 data analysis needed.

nautilus12 8y ago

My guess is that they are really bad at de-duping products. Product ids vs skus and all that jazz is historically not handled well in recommender systems, and those product not recognized as variants of already purchased products end up being the closest in the "graph" to be recommended so shoot to the top.

elliekelly 8y ago
But what really drives me nuts is textbooks. The data is practically handed to them with ISBNs. How hard could it possibly be for someone to tweak the algorithm so it doesn't suggest to me every edition of every text book I've ever purchased? Beyond the customer annoyance factor, this is a business issue. There is a virtually 0% chance that any textbook suggestion will be converted to a sale. That takes up valuable suggestion real estate on the user's screen and keeps me from seeing a suggestion that I might actually be interested in buying.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

carlmr 8y ago

Well it might be true for certain products. But I find it funny how they recommend me my phone or my laptop. Those aren't things you usually buy in bulk.

simonw 8y ago
See this thread by patio11 for a good explanation as to why this isn't as dumb as it looks: https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209 https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > Here's a true statement: People who will in 2018 give birth to a child named Abigail are at least 5X more likely to give birth to a child in 2019 than people chosen at random. > "Naming your child Abigail can't make you more likely to get pregnant." > Again, failure to do the math. > (You get a 2X there, for free, from the observation "If you had a child named Abigail this year you are biologically capable of having children; this is not true of no less than half of humanity. Now apply same insight to childbearing age and you're already at 5X+.) This is terrible math. Nursing a child severely inhibits getting pregnant; without use of formula (or a substitute like goat's milk or what have you), it is extremely rare for children to be spaced only one year apart. It's rare enough that there's a special term for such children -- "Irish twins". If you want to swagger your conditional probability, you should know that you've got to account for that in the probability of giving birth one year given that you gave birth the year before. You can't just account for the positive adjustments, ignore the negative ones, and then say "the odds are at least as good as they would be if the existing anticorrelations didn't exist". > What's a SWAG for how often a purchase immediately goes wrong? Not right color? Fridge DOA? Shoot I mismeasured my kitchen? Wife just hates it? Call that 2%. If I fix it within a week, then 2% / 7 = 2.9e-3 probability of purchasing a new fridge. > That's a 10X relative risk. But of those listed options for "immediately goes wrong", zero of them would result in re-buying the same fridge. Wrong color, I mismeasured my kitchen, and wife hates it would cause you to buy a different fridge. Fridge DOA would cause you to refund the fridge and get a replacement. How many people, faced with the expense of a fridge that hasn't worked out, figure the best course is to just write it off and buy a second copy, hoping that it will work out better?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rubicon33 8y ago

All that machine learning and they still haven't cracked down on counterfeit goods on their platform?

bduerst 8y ago
That would require Amazon to prioritize customer satisfaction over bulk sales.

snowwrestler 8y ago

It's worth pointing out that this recommendation behavior is only unintelligent if it has a downside, i.e. reduces Amazon's profits. Companies (and their AIs) only care about your business transactions, not whether you're annoyed. I'm sure Amazon engineering is well aware of the jokes about their recommendation engines. But their recommendation engines are not calibrated to reduce jokes, they are calibrated to increase sales. If you only know ONE thing about a person, pinging them about that one thing might still be better than ignoring them, or offering completely random recommendations. A memorably annoying ad can work better than a boring and inoffensive one, sometimes.

coltonv 8y ago
That's not true, putting a product I've already ordered on my recommended list instead of something i actually want to buy is costing them money in lost sales.
- afthonos 8y ago
  That’s assuming those are the alternatives. If the alternative is instead to show you something you’ve already ordered or nothing, the odds of you ordering again if you see the thing you’ve ordered already are small, but nonzero.
  - bduerst 8y ago
    That's a false dichotomy. There's a number of things they can show you, not just reorder or nothing. In a perfect world for targeting sales, they will predict and show you exactly what it is you want to buy next. Repurchasing is just a very lazy way of predicting what you'll buy next.
    - ojilles 8y ago
      I'm not afthonos, but I think his/her point is that they may not be able to predict exactly what it is you want to buy. (I find it super annoying, too; but that doesn't mean folks have figured out purchase reco's at scale)

cowmoo728 8y ago

https://twitter.com/girlfromblupo/status/982156453396996096?lang=en https://twitter.com/girlfromblupo/status/982156453396996096?... "Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one. Necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict. No matter how temptingly you email me, I'm not going to think, oh go on then, just one more toilet seat, I'll treat myself."

pjscott 8y ago
From Amazon's perspective, someone who just bought a toilet seat is much more likely than the average person to buy another one. Maybe they're doing interior furnishing work and put loads of seats on toilets. Maybe they're replacing a broken crappy plastic seat on one of their toilets with a nicer one -- might they perhaps decide to upgrade their other toilets as well? And sure, I know that these are all pretty weak signals and that the toilet seat recommendations will probably go un-clicked. But Amazon has to do the best it can with not very much information, and if they have to hawk toilet seats to a hundred people who've already bought them to find the one guy who's remodeling several bathrooms, that's probably a really good gamble for them to take.

darksaints 8y ago

This one is funny, and has a couple of obvious solutions that have been prevented due to internal politics. The short answer is that they have a couple of different recommender systems, all competing against each other internally for sales lift. One is purely based off of pageviews. When you get recommendations for something you already bought, many times it is because you looked at it, but they don't know nor care if you already bought it. In their words, it works really well and accounting for sales brings in a lot of needless complexity. Another is based off of sales. They also don't care if you already bought it because according to them, it works well. I remember trying to point out to them that for some types of products (specifically consumable products) this would work really well, but durables not so much. They claimed otherwise, that although they couldn't explain it, it was entirely common for people to rebuy things like vacuum cleaners and TVs and kitchen knives. I did a tiny bit of research to show them why they thought that, and proved with a small segment (vacuum cleaners, I believe), that after you filter for returns and replacements, that the probability of sequentially buying two of the same vacuum cleaner was effectively zero. They asked me to do it for the rest of their products, but I didn't have limitless time to spend on helping another team, especially one with a PM who was a complete dick to me for having the audacity to make a suggestion that he hadn't thought of. In all, I believe there are a dozen or so recommender services, each with their own widget. There are tons of people that think all of the recommenders have merits in some areas and drawbacks in others, and the customer would be better off if they merged concepts into a single recommender system. But they all compete for sales lift, they all think their system is better than the other systems, and they refuse to merge concepts or incorporate outside ideas because they all believe they are fundamentally superior to the other recommenders. Just a small anecdotal glimpse at the hilariously counterproductive internal politics at Amazon.

bduerst 8y ago

I know this is a joke, but you're a magnitude more likely to buy something if you've already bought it once. The whole retargeting industry is built on this, but I agree - it doesn't necessarily make it useful.

gweinberg 8y ago
Depends on the something. If I buy a carton of milk, I'm pretty likely to buy another before too long. If I buy a new refrigerator, probably not. Besides, the point of advertising is to get you to buy things you otherwise wouldn't. It would be pretty pointless to show me an ad that says "you love eggs, you eat them for breakfast every day, so buy some next time you're at the supermarket", because I was going to do that anyway.
- bduerst 8y ago
  Well of course there are outlier product categories which are not repeat purchases, like engagement rings, funeral caskets, refridgerators, etc. That goes without saying, and if someone is paying to retarget those they're probably wasting their budget.

freeone3000 8y ago

Not the same product, similar products in form and function. It works great for books! Pretty good for movies! Alright for CDs! Generalize out to everything.

anonymous5133 8y ago

The ML is optimizing for revenue growth, not customer satisfaction.