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This happens all the time on Amazon. Just search for a product, like shirt, and then change the sorting from "relevance" to "high to low". For this particular
by IncRnd 6y ago
This happens all the time on Amazon. Just search for a product, like shirt, and then change the sorting from "relevance" to "high to low". For this particular search at this time there is a nice women's $2,000 Nike tee shirt.
- saalweachter 6y agoIn general, sorting by anything but "relevance" is just a way to find bad data, like sorting TVs by size and finding a TV which reinterpreted its size from mm to inches or vice versa and now seems to be an absurdly large or small TV, on paper. It's not even spamminess in this case, just bad data.
- H8crilA 6y agoMakes one appreciate the effort that's put into the "relevance" scoring. It's probably >100 engineers working in Amazon on just this core ranking problem.
- lukevp 6y agoTuning relevance is extremely difficult, and it’s not just an information retrieval problem - at Amazon’s size (and even smaller companies) a lot of what you see for “relevance” is hand-tuned by humans, through machine learning on longer-tail queries, and some combination of both in the middle (with sponsored or high margin or velocity items weighting more heavily). If you search for something like “men’s shoes” there’s 0% chance you’re getting a search result, it’s going to be a curated result page. Lots of people work on this hand tuning, but they’re not engineers, they’re product and marketing people. If you search for “men’s shoes with green laces” you’ll see the real challenge, with a top 10 search result that’s not even shoes (it’s a pack of laces).
- saalweachter 6y agoSome of my favorite test queries for shopping sites (from back when I used to work on a comparison shopping engine: [apples to apples] -> frequently returns random "Apple" products, because when you dedupe, stem and remove stopwords from that query, you're left with "apple", and Apple products are big ticket items. [shirt dress] -> frequently returns dress shirts, because many sites essentially ignore word order or the notion of compound words. [fish swim vest] -> frequently returns fishing vests, partially because of overstemming (many POS stemmers will stem "fishing" -> "fish", but in a product search setting, it's usually the wrong thing to do).
- H8crilA 6y agoHere's one that's fun if your objects of interest include cities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best,_Netherlands https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best,_Netherlands What's the [best city in europe]? Obviously "Best, Netherlands".
- srtjstjsj 6y agoIf your discard outliers you get usable data.
- saalweachter 6y agoThat helps, but you also have a lot of bad data at the extremes that are still within the bounds of plausibility. For instance, nine out of ten 122" TVs might actually be 12.2" TVs that got misinterpreted or typo'd to 122", because small TVs are so much more common than large TVs that there can be more malformed small TVs than well formed large TVs, but you can't necessarily discard all of the 122" TVs as outliers, because there are actually valid TVs in that range as well.
- 1f60c 6y agoThe other day, I found a household appliance (I don't remember what kind), that boasted 16 gigs of RAM.
- IncRnd 6y agoHaha! That's crazy! Though, it does point out that many listings may have been created by copy&paste, leaving them with incorrect information.
- mjcohen 6y agoProbably a refrigerator. A washing machine only takes 8 gig.
- IncRnd 6y agoRefrigerator Repairing And Servicing, Memory Size: 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/refrigerator-repairing-and-servicing-17772684962.html https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/refrigerator-repairing-...