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To be fair, Amazon has 10 years of purchase history on my account, and they can't manage to put up anything on the home page that I'm interested in. Personally,

To be fair, Amazon has 10 years of purchase history on my account, and they can't manage to put up anything on the home page that I'm interested in. Personally, I'm very much starting to doubt algorithmic recommendations for shopping sites. They work for books and music, but as Amazon has morphed into offering everything they can't recommend anything decent. I just get the same generic recommendations for products similar to my last few purchases, similar to Google advertising products that I've already searched for and bought. Adtech has promised a lot, but in my experience it hasn't delivered on most of those promises. Oddly, I find the ebay homepage more useful, since it also displays a selection of products from sellers I watch, and has figured out I have a fetish for vintage test equipment. I don't think I've ever bought anything from the Amazon homepage, but I bought at least 3 items that I saw on the eBay homepage (from sellers I watched) in the last year. This relies on active participation from the user, however, and benefits people who have used the site for a long time. And I can't kid myself, eBay can't grow selling used test equipment and motorcycle parts, but they still do the online sale of unique items better than anyone else. I do miss the 'rummage sale' aspect though, it's now nearly impossible to browse and find weird items, you have to just search for specific items rather than browse.

hutattedonmyarm 8y ago
My housemate recently got a suggestion for a food processor dash button
- ahartmetz 8y ago
  Haha, brilliant. A good example of "AI" gone wrong. I wonder whether Amazon's recommender has a flag for durable goods, and if so, how it failed.
- dmartinez 8y ago
  Perhaps Amazon knows something about planned obsolescence that the consumer does not.
C1sc0cat 8y ago
Yes all I get is products I have already brought - yes I have brought that RPG supplement No I am not going to buy it again why even bother sending me that email or suggesting it?
janekm 8y ago
Interestingly, the Chinese equivalent of eBay (taobao) does an extremely good job of recommendations for me. So much so that if I search for something, and can't quite find what I'm looking for, often the exact thing I was looking for is a recommendation the next day (or a better version I didn't know exists). My suspicion is that they have teams of "professional shoppers" seeding the AI algorithms.
paulie_a 8y ago
You don't need to doubt algorithmic shopping suggestions and just say they are absolutely worthless. It's amazing how much effort has been put into that concept throughout the industry and it is universally junk. They might as well simplify it: pick ten categories of items you have bought from, pick a random item from each. That's like ten lines of code, done. It won't be any less useful than what they are doing now

hutattedonmyarm 8y ago

My housemate recently got a suggestion for a food processor dash button

ahartmetz 8y ago
Haha, brilliant. A good example of "AI" gone wrong. I wonder whether Amazon's recommender has a flag for durable goods, and if so, how it failed.
dmartinez 8y ago
Perhaps Amazon knows something about planned obsolescence that the consumer does not.

C1sc0cat 8y ago

Yes all I get is products I have already brought - yes I have brought that RPG supplement No I am not going to buy it again why even bother sending me that email or suggesting it?

janekm 8y ago

Interestingly, the Chinese equivalent of eBay (taobao) does an extremely good job of recommendations for me. So much so that if I search for something, and can't quite find what I'm looking for, often the exact thing I was looking for is a recommendation the next day (or a better version I didn't know exists). My suspicion is that they have teams of "professional shoppers" seeding the AI algorithms.

paulie_a 8y ago

You don't need to doubt algorithmic shopping suggestions and just say they are absolutely worthless. It's amazing how much effort has been put into that concept throughout the industry and it is universally junk. They might as well simplify it: pick ten categories of items you have bought from, pick a random item from each. That's like ten lines of code, done. It won't be any less useful than what they are doing now