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If you're asking about services too: Yandex Market. It's like Google Product Search that is actually successful and widely used for searching for specific produ

by aasasd 6y ago

If you're asking about services too: Yandex Market. It's like Google Product Search that is actually successful and widely used for searching for specific products, or Amazon that doesn't swindle you left and right. It's basically just a large catalog of products, filled by third-parties a-la Amazon now, only it didn't sell anything itself (until recently). Instead, it had detailed characteristics for a lot of products, with corresponding filters in the catalog; and good user reviews. Since Yandex is good at dealing with unstructured text, even poor data exports by vendors end up organized decently on the service. Since Yandex had millions of users on its other services, they all could leave reviews without much hassle. And since Yandex is primarily a search engine, it knows when a bogus review is spammed across the web. Alas, it's only available in Russian since it works with Russian shops. Every time I need to look for a product on the English web, I lament that there's no service that is quite that solid. Amazon has filters, but search results usually look like simply a bit better Aliexpress. In regard to Google Product Search I don't even know anything particular—I tried to use it a couple times, and my general impression is that it... exists. Not much else.

modeless 6y ago
Amazon product listings and reviews are such a cesspool these days. It's a travesty. It's completely impossible to tell good quality stuff from useless garbage (especially since they are usually commingled in the same listing), and often it's impossible to find good quality stuff at all under the barrage of listings of the same two products with different fake brand names. The sorting options are a joke and the ratings are gamed so much they indicate nothing except how much the seller spent buying reviews. It's amazing that Google hasn't been able to do better here.
- derefr 6y ago
  You’d think someone would have come along who just scrapes Amazon’s listings, applies their own intelligent indexing heuristics, and spits out a new search/browse page that just links through to Amazon’s regular product pages. Like CamelCamelCamel, but for dimensions other than price.
  - modeless 6y ago
    I thought about trying to build something like this, but figured that I'd probably just get sued. Also I think matching listings to accurate product metadata would be practically impossible even if you had a good source for the metadata, and it still wouldn't fix issues like inventory commingling in the warehouse or bait and switch listings that reduce product quality over time.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    AFAIK in the kakaku.com case, between kakaku.com and shopping sites are partner. Sites (including Amazon.co.jp) gets customers, kakaku.com gets affiliate fee. Why this model won't work in the US?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- flarg 6y ago
  Fakespot
- calmoo 6y ago
  Fakespot does this (it doesn't integrate like you described but it does a decent job of spotting fakes)
- mapster 6y ago
  I goto Reddit, HN or Nextdoor for product recommends. Amazon reviews are a joke nowadays unfortunately.
karlicoss 6y ago
Can confirm -- if I need to buy some electronic device, I'd do a search/filter on yandex.market first and compare side by side. Amazon with its fuzzy searches is garbage for such shopping.
kalleboo 6y ago
Sweden has prisjakt.nu, and Japan has kakaku.com that serve the same purpose, they're both great! It's so nice to be able to drill down into any product in any product category (for kakaku this is not just tech products but contact lenses, credit cards, movers, electricity providers, car insurance, phone plans, etc) using the specs you want, and then sort by intelligently selected columns like $/TB for a harddisk. Amazon attempts to do some product categorization but it doesn't work at all - even when they have the category you want to filter on the results are usually wrong, and the sort options are bad and marred by their ads and recommendations.
- RasmusLarsen 6y ago
  I don't know the exact list, but pricespy (prisjakt) is in a lot of countries. I have used .no/.se/.co.uk previously and they all seem to be at about the same level for their respective countries.
  - universa1 6y ago
    Sounds a lot like geizhals.de - price comparison site with detailed info on products, best for tech products though
    - tatami 6y ago
      Geizhals is amazing! I started using it for price comparison almost 15 years ago, but nowadays I use it mainly as a database to filter for products which fit my needs and are available.
    - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
      it's an awesome product search focused on depth not breadth. This site lets you filter headsets by connectors and dog food by taste.
- jug 6y ago
  Prisjakt (Pricespy) is very deep in Swedish online shopping culture. I wonder if Amazon realizes what they are up to. It does make their website feel superfluous to me and more like what what I'd expect from a company of the year 2010. What I like most about Prisjakt is that they don't try to second guess what I want given a basic search phrase. Instead, Prisjakt gives me the categories to drill down into tables. Sortable and filterable tables with product name, price, rating, and category-specific columns (like storage size and $/GB for hard drives). The filters run DEEP. If you're looking for a HDR display, you can be happy with a "HDR" filter but also opt into DisplayHDR 1000 certified displays with 120+ Hz. For the entire Sweden because every decent Swedish retail chain and store is on this website, and they have everything between solid state drives and shoes in their database. If you look for watches you have filters and columns for e.g. automatic, solar powered watches, etc. Amazon is very, very different. They're also a front to various stores but try to make it appear like THEY are the store when they are really not. Prisjakt instead just has this razor sharp focus on making you in charge of the data and forming decisions based on that, and then when the decision is made, presents you a list of the stores with that product and their respective prices. You are in control and maybe you prefer a certain one because you're a long time user there and like them. So Amazon becomes a "fake store front" (like Sweden's CDON) and Prisjakt is more like just a database. One optimized for usability and presentation.
Black101 6y ago
Yandex reverse image search is also much better then Google's version in my experience.
- adventured 6y ago
  Google intentionally tamped down their reverse image search several years ago. They fundamentally changed how the product works, the results that it delivers, and did it on purpose. It's definitely inferior if you're actually looking to find copies of an image (Google is fully aware, they don't want you to be able to effectively search their image system that way).
  - beefield 6y ago
    > they don't want you to be able to effectively search their image system that way) Why?
    - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
      This is an excellent question.
  - pizza 6y ago
    Interestingly enough, Yandex did so also, a while ago, as it was being used as a scarily good open-source undercover agent identification tool https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guide-to-using-reverse-image-search-for-investigations/ https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guid... although I can't seem to find the followup post that actually discusses how the Yandex search quality decreased following the publication of the original article
    - llampx 6y ago
      Fascinating read, thank you. I can't help but wonder what is available to big companies and governments these days in terms of technology and algorithms that we laypeople don't have access to or even dream about.
daishi424 6y ago
Looks like they've been running A/B tests recently - reviews are hidden on some products. Or maybe they hide reviews for anonymous user. I hope it won't go further than that.
sm4rk0 6y ago
Something like https://idealo.de/ https://idealo.de/ (and .at .es .fr .it .co.uk)?
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  Idealo is a great price comparison website, but not really for finding the right product for you. More for finding where to buy the product you've already chosen.
- scns 6y ago
  I usually use https://geizhals.de/ https://geizhals.de/ since it is more tech related. Useable for people living in EU/UK/AT/DE/PL.

by aasasd 6y ago

modeless 6y ago

Amazon product listings and reviews are such a cesspool these days. It's a travesty. It's completely impossible to tell good quality stuff from useless garbage (especially since they are usually commingled in the same listing), and often it's impossible to find good quality stuff at all under the barrage of listings of the same two products with different fake brand names. The sorting options are a joke and the ratings are gamed so much they indicate nothing except how much the seller spent buying reviews. It's amazing that Google hasn't been able to do better here.

derefr 6y ago
You’d think someone would have come along who just scrapes Amazon’s listings, applies their own intelligent indexing heuristics, and spits out a new search/browse page that just links through to Amazon’s regular product pages. Like CamelCamelCamel, but for dimensions other than price.
- modeless 6y ago
  I thought about trying to build something like this, but figured that I'd probably just get sued. Also I think matching listings to accurate product metadata would be practically impossible even if you had a good source for the metadata, and it still wouldn't fix issues like inventory commingling in the warehouse or bait and switch listings that reduce product quality over time.
- fomine3 6y ago
  AFAIK in the kakaku.com case, between kakaku.com and shopping sites are partner. Sites (including Amazon.co.jp) gets customers, kakaku.com gets affiliate fee. Why this model won't work in the US?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
flarg 6y ago
Fakespot
calmoo 6y ago
Fakespot does this (it doesn't integrate like you described but it does a decent job of spotting fakes)
mapster 6y ago
I goto Reddit, HN or Nextdoor for product recommends. Amazon reviews are a joke nowadays unfortunately.

karlicoss 6y ago

Can confirm -- if I need to buy some electronic device, I'd do a search/filter on yandex.market first and compare side by side. Amazon with its fuzzy searches is garbage for such shopping.

kalleboo 6y ago

Sweden has prisjakt.nu, and Japan has kakaku.com that serve the same purpose, they're both great! It's so nice to be able to drill down into any product in any product category (for kakaku this is not just tech products but contact lenses, credit cards, movers, electricity providers, car insurance, phone plans, etc) using the specs you want, and then sort by intelligently selected columns like $/TB for a harddisk. Amazon attempts to do some product categorization but it doesn't work at all - even when they have the category you want to filter on the results are usually wrong, and the sort options are bad and marred by their ads and recommendations.

RasmusLarsen 6y ago
I don't know the exact list, but pricespy (prisjakt) is in a lot of countries. I have used .no/.se/.co.uk previously and they all seem to be at about the same level for their respective countries.
- universa1 6y ago
  Sounds a lot like geizhals.de - price comparison site with detailed info on products, best for tech products though
  - tatami 6y ago
    Geizhals is amazing! I started using it for price comparison almost 15 years ago, but nowadays I use it mainly as a database to filter for products which fit my needs and are available.
  - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
    it's an awesome product search focused on depth not breadth. This site lets you filter headsets by connectors and dog food by taste.
jug 6y ago
Prisjakt (Pricespy) is very deep in Swedish online shopping culture. I wonder if Amazon realizes what they are up to. It does make their website feel superfluous to me and more like what what I'd expect from a company of the year 2010. What I like most about Prisjakt is that they don't try to second guess what I want given a basic search phrase. Instead, Prisjakt gives me the categories to drill down into tables. Sortable and filterable tables with product name, price, rating, and category-specific columns (like storage size and $/GB for hard drives). The filters run DEEP. If you're looking for a HDR display, you can be happy with a "HDR" filter but also opt into DisplayHDR 1000 certified displays with 120+ Hz. For the entire Sweden because every decent Swedish retail chain and store is on this website, and they have everything between solid state drives and shoes in their database. If you look for watches you have filters and columns for e.g. automatic, solar powered watches, etc. Amazon is very, very different. They're also a front to various stores but try to make it appear like THEY are the store when they are really not. Prisjakt instead just has this razor sharp focus on making you in charge of the data and forming decisions based on that, and then when the decision is made, presents you a list of the stores with that product and their respective prices. You are in control and maybe you prefer a certain one because you're a long time user there and like them. So Amazon becomes a "fake store front" (like Sweden's CDON) and Prisjakt is more like just a database. One optimized for usability and presentation.

Black101 6y ago

Yandex reverse image search is also much better then Google's version in my experience.

adventured 6y ago
Google intentionally tamped down their reverse image search several years ago. They fundamentally changed how the product works, the results that it delivers, and did it on purpose. It's definitely inferior if you're actually looking to find copies of an image (Google is fully aware, they don't want you to be able to effectively search their image system that way).
- beefield 6y ago
  > they don't want you to be able to effectively search their image system that way) Why?
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    This is an excellent question.
- pizza 6y ago
  Interestingly enough, Yandex did so also, a while ago, as it was being used as a scarily good open-source undercover agent identification tool https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guide-to-using-reverse-image-search-for-investigations/ https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guid... although I can't seem to find the followup post that actually discusses how the Yandex search quality decreased following the publication of the original article
  - llampx 6y ago
    Fascinating read, thank you. I can't help but wonder what is available to big companies and governments these days in terms of technology and algorithms that we laypeople don't have access to or even dream about.

daishi424 6y ago

Looks like they've been running A/B tests recently - reviews are hidden on some products. Or maybe they hide reviews for anonymous user. I hope it won't go further than that.

sm4rk0 6y ago

Something like https://idealo.de/ https://idealo.de/ (and .at .es .fr .it .co.uk)?

benhurmarcel 6y ago
Idealo is a great price comparison website, but not really for finding the right product for you. More for finding where to buy the product you've already chosen.
scns 6y ago
I usually use https://geizhals.de/ https://geizhals.de/ since it is more tech related. Useable for people living in EU/UK/AT/DE/PL.