10 ms·

Home Depot Finds DIY Success with Vector Search

138 points by gk1 5y ago

huffmsa 5y ago
I bought a house in the past year and have become a regular at Home Depot. Now that I'm aware, I have noticed that I've had very little issue with their online search. And the site tells me exactly the aisle and bay # to get it
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Example of common sense HD decision: "Wait, why are we developing an app for our associates to locate items, when we could also just expose that to the customer themselves?"
mhb 5y ago
FTA: Instead of powering the search by attempting a direct one-to-one matching of keywords, a vector search engine attempts to match the input term to a vector, which is an array of features generated from objects in the catalog.
binarymax 5y ago
If you're into this kind of thing check out the #vectors-in-search channel at https://opensourceconnections.com/slack https://opensourceconnections.com/slack -- Us vector search nerds hang out there (and some of the Home Depot search nerds too) and share insights and ideas.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ethbr0 5y ago
Nice to see Huiming Qu getting a mention. Home Depot seemed to have a tradition of good, practical engineering when I was there. Emphasis on solving the problem incrementally and reliably, rather than trying to boil the ocean. (Disclaimer: Former employee)
- doodlebugging 5y ago
  As a long-time Home Depot customer who works on everything DIY (cars/gardens/home improvements/etc) I have found over the past few years that Home Depot search will consistently get me to the product that I am looking to buy or close enough that it is easy to comb through the results to refine the search. This is in stark contrast with Lowe's where I would describe the difference as being akin to searching via Google (Home Depot) or by Cuil (Lowe's). For those unfamiliar with Cuil: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/cuil-theory https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/cuil-theory If you know her please send some high praise from me. I am one of the people who has long experience with making things and knows several ways to describe common tools, materials, parts, etc but who hates to have to cycle through each of them hoping that the inventory management engine recognizes the product and lists it near the top when it delivers search results. As a customer, I could tell that results from Home Depot searches delivered quality results by a simple search for a 2x4 of a specific length. Excellent work!
  - twothamendment 5y ago
    After building 3 houses, some of them doing all electrical, windows, doors, trim, flooring, paint and endless projects - I too have been impressed with the search results. Lowe's, on the other hand blows HD away with speed. HD could also work on their funky layout issues. On an up to date mobile chrome, sometimes it decides that I'm really on a desktop (no, I didn't hit desktop mode) and it renders what is nearly useless on a small screen.
    - doodlebugging 5y ago
      >On an up to date mobile chrome, sometimes it decides that I'm really on a desktop (no, I didn't hit desktop mode) and it renders what is nearly useless on a small screen. Thanks for reminding me of this. I'm still using a Windows phone. It will be obsoleted soon though, and I had blamed most of the poor rendering of HD site on a phone on the phone itself since I commonly get the "unsupported browser - please upgrade" messages from lots of sites. Like Best Buy, their mobile version is not good and borders on unusable. I had always blamed that on my own decision to use an obsolete phone as long as possible instead of on poor mobile website performance. I tend to locate the part that I need on my desktop, send a link or screenshot to my phone. That way I know which aisle/bin to find it once I make it to the store and don't have to waste time exploring all the things that I want but don't need. Lowe's does throw up search results a bit faster but to me, the time wasted trying to find the right combination of terms to use in searching is not worth the small price difference between the two stores. I buy from Lowe's when I am looking for a specific brand that is not carried at Home Depot.
throwaway984393 5y ago
This sounds a lot like semantic web search? Can anyone share how it differs?
- ethbr0 5y ago
  I'd guess that the primary difference is in the attribute space and specificity. Home Depot products are specific in odd ways. E.g. an 8' PVC pipe can be shortened on-site, a 3' downrod for a ceiling fan might not be able to. So substitutability is hard.
- sp332 5y ago
  The part at the beginning where employees manually loaded possible search terms sounds like the semantic web to me. This project uses deep learning to automatically direct a whole space of possible search terms to an item, instead of just missing all the terms that were not manually added.
- simonhughes22 5y ago
  I worked on the system. It's a similar idea but it's on e-commerce products and not websites. So you can't use things like page rank when doing product search.
  - throwaway984393 5y ago
    Well semantic web search is less about traditional web search and more about semantic relationships between terms using ontologies. If you search for "pipe A500", the search engine would deconstruct that. It would see pipes have steel, and a coating for steel, and a grade of steel. It would see A500 is a grade of steel. Pipes don't have a grade A500, but tubes do, and tubes have the other classifications that pipes do. It may then conclude that while 'A500' and 'pipe' are not linked directly, a different term may be very similar and a more direct match ('tube'), and thus return 'A500 tube' results. It seemed like the machine learning model was building relations between these different concepts and using them to improve the search, but without the intentional taxonomic mapping that semantic web uses. Semantic web is essentially more of a curated database of relationships, whereas the machine learning appears to be using another method to establish the relationships. I wonder if they're not doing basically the same thing.
raghavbali 5y ago
vector search is everywhere nowadays. Glad to see another success story. Kudos to the team
tbran 5y ago
I wish someone at Home Depot would fix come of their website's basic usability issues. The layout shifts, bad location UI, and slow speed really sour the experience. Interestingly, I recently did what I thought was a basic search for a 2'x4' piece of birch plywood and the results were pretty wonky. I ended up drilling down through menus instead. If you contrast this with McMaster Carr's website, you'll wonder what went wrong at HD. I've been ordering online from McMaster for probably close to two decades, and it's better in every way from speed to interface to product specs.
- wil421 5y ago
  I think the problem is the vendors loading different information into whatever platform they use. I’ve seen it at other retailers and customer support said the vendors load all the info, in my case she said they entered it wrong.
- simonhughes22 5y ago
  The results here look fine to me in positions 3 and 4 - https://www.homedepot.com/s/2'x4'%2520piece%2520of%2520birch%2520plywood?NCNI-5 https://www.homedepot.com/s/2'x4'%2520piece%2520of%2520birch... What are you expecting to see? I worked on this search engine so interested to get feedback, good or bad (bad is actually more useful!).
  - fuzzer37 5y ago
    Well almost half the results on the page are 4x8's, when explicitly searching for 2x4's for one.
    - simonhughes22 5y ago
      It does semantic matching. We don't have a lot of exact matches for that search for birch wood (given the exact dimensions) so the engine broadens the search criteria automatically. You never want to just show exact matches, so long as they are ranked near the top over fuzzier matches. People often assume the search is bad if they see a lot of broader matches, without realizing that there might not be many perfect matches for the exact query given.
bradly 5y ago
I’m building a tool to measure, track, and improve search and AI models. If you’d like to beta test, please reach out!
adnmcq999 5y ago
I’m a sales associate at Home Depot - I have to look up items all the time. I usually just google “item Home Depot” This usually gets me the item or a similar item. If the item is similar and not what they want, I have a tree categorization and I can usually go up a level. The interesting problem w the Home Depot I think is figuring out how to categorize and when to make a category. For example “screws” is an obvious category in which there will be sub-categories and parameters on which to filter like “length” or “color” (I use this a lot). What filter parameters to have is also interesting as is how to display the results. Most items are returned in a list form but, annoyingly, some types of items have their own splash page that is kind of unique to that item. If the item is weird, it might be really hard to categorize, usually these go into _____ accessories. Overall I think Home Depot does a good job w the search except the UI is laggy as someone mentioned and as they also mentioned the location setting is ALWAYS WRONG. FIX THIS NOW! Every. Single. Time I have to check if an item is in stock at my store, it puts me in the wrong store and I have to manually change it myself. Am I just a moron or is there really no way to set it and forget it?
- bagels 5y ago
  The store location selector forgets all the time which you had selected last. What's best is it appears to try to infer location from ip address, so when you are in a home Depot on a mobile, it picks a different store from the one you are standing in.
  - paulmd 5y ago
    I think a lot of stores incorporate a "cheater" mechanism where if you're on the store wifi they use that as the location. You could pick it up via IP or hardware MAC (even if you are on a VPN the local router still knows your MAC from when you passed the ToS accept portal). Doesn't help cell service of course, and cellular data clients are REALLY tricky to geolocate properly. Cell towers are often trunked a considerable distance (apparently?) so your IP can indicate you're quite far from your physical location. Pages really rely on the browser to cue location in that scenario, but of course many of us turn it off, and at that point you get what you get.
alexfromapex 5y ago
I think a lot of companies are going this direction now with search, what are you all finding are the best language models?
charliejuggler 5y ago
If you're interested in the detail behind this check out Simon Hughes' talk at our Haystack search relevance conference last year https://haystackconf.com/2021/ https://haystackconf.com/2021/ - the video is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWc4DOM-CHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWc4DOM-CHk . Haystack US 2022 is open for business (and talk submissions) too at www.haystackconf.com if you're into search!
zucked 5y ago
Home Depot does some things right and some things so poorly I wonder if it's intentional. Here's one I ran into just yesterday. I wanted to know the ballpark cost of a belt-driven garage door opener. So I google "home depot belt drive garage door opener". Landed on this page: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Openers/Belt-Drive/N-5yc1vZas5uZ1z0xxza https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Opener... So... where's the garage door openers? I know you carry them. No amount of modification of the search options surfaces any belt-driven garage door openers. Thinking I was crazy, I went up a category to "Garage Door Openers" and clicked the "Belt Drive" category at the top. Same result. WTH? I will say that the accurate listing of item location in the store has saved me hours and hours of wandering and even if I can't find the specific item I'm looking for (see above) I can look up generic garage door openers and find what aisle it's likely to be in.
- fckgw 5y ago
  That sounds more like Google sending you to the wrong page on Home Depot's site, no? If you punch in "belt drive garage door opener" on the actual Home Depot website it returns the results you want.
  - zucked 5y ago
    It's a borked landing page, I suspect. Go up a product level: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Openers/N-5yc1vZas5u https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Opener... Click on "Belt Drive" among the Opener Types. Same result. Not terribly related to the topic at hand, but its definitely a gripe I have the the HD website sometimes works great and sometimes is terribly unhelpful.
- ec109685 5y ago
  Doesn't work: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Openers/Belt-Drive/N-5yc1vZas5uZ1z0xxza https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Opener... Works: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Openers/Belt-Drive/N-5yc1vZas5uZ1z1ttgx https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Opener... Also Works: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Does-Not-Matter/Does-Not-Matter/N-5yc1vZas5uZ1z1ttgx https://www.homedepot.com/b/Does-Not-Matter/Does-Not-Matter/... The "seo" part of the url doesn't actually matter. Where they went wrong is not redirecting a page that has no results to a one that does when SEO text matches.
coding123 5y ago
If anyone from Home Depot is there: I normally search for T&G Plywood and I get what I expect. Right now that search is broken at the & and it thinks my entire search string is just "T". Instead I have to enter "T&G Plywood" into the search - literally adding the html entity and that actually works correctly for the search.
- simonhughes22 5y ago
  Thanks that is definitely broken. Logging the issue right now.
  - coding123 5y ago
    :heart:
dncornholio 5y ago
https://www.homedepot.com/ https://www.homedepot.com/ is showing a 403 forbidden page to me since GDPR hit. Such a spit in face left bad taste in my mouth. Not even a page that explains why, just the standard 403 page..
owenfi 5y ago
Now I just wish they would fix the search field so it would actually submit when I press return on my iPhone.
bombledmonk 5y ago
While I appreciate the sentiment of the topic of fuzziness and AI, this also breaks search for people who are looking for precision. For people who are used to a McMaster-Carr or Digi-Key style search where precision matters in results, the fuzziness introduces ambiguity and hampers repeatability. These are both very important when designing products. Amazon, Home Depot, and Lowes are a bear when trying to find something with very specific specifications, it's quite literally rage inducing to add a more specific keyword to q query and get more (wrong) results in the output.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
abanayev 5y ago
This is why Semantle is better than Wordle
sockaddr 5y ago
Lowes needs something similar. Their search is worse than useless. It commonly doesn't return relevant results that can be found by searching completely irrelevant terms. It's bizarre.
thirdtrigger 5y ago
Super cool article, we work on OSS vector search technology (Weaviate) as well and I can confirm that we see many similar use cases especially with multi-model models and rerankers.
cptskippy 5y ago
I hate this shit. I hate when companies try to optimize their results to what they think I want. I don't care if it's Home Depot or Amazon, nothing infuriates me more than searching for something I know exists and getting contextualized results that are not what I asked for. If you're going to do this, at the very least allow me to turn it off so I can see what I'm missing. I wanted to see if HD had a outdoor jbox extension ring in stock before I drove down there, so what did I search for? Well "outdoor jbox extension ring" of course. What did I get results for? A sprinkler spike, various types of romex, a Wyze flood light, and extension cord protectors. I guess at least now I know why their search is useless. * What would be helpful is knowing which terms, if any, didn't get hits. Maybe it was jbox and I need to type "junction box", idk. But providing me garbage results is just infuriating.
interestica 5y ago
> Home Depot has a list of IT projects that it wants to tackle I'm outside of Canada. Trying to go to homedepot.ca just gives me an 'Access Denied". I legitimately want to purchase things to send to people back home and cannot. There's not even some sort of graceful fallback. I don't understand the logic and wonder if it's just an honest IT routing mistake.
- ffhhj 5y ago
  That's interesting. A few months ago my father's credit card was charged by Home Depot in Canada, and we don't live in that country. It was certainly fraud, and the payment was reverted. Maybe their systems are compromised and that's the reason to deny foreign access?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dtgriscom 5y ago
  I just tried from the US (Massachusetts): worked just fine. (I let it have my location, and it suggested I shop in Sherbrooke, QC, which actually could be the closest Canadian HD to me.)
  - interestica 5y ago
    I'm in the US Virgin islands and it exists in some sort of inbetween. (Google maps denies some access because it has erroneously labeled the 'country' code as VI) So yeah, it's kinda absurd to deny access. Not really sure how to fix the various errors I've encountered

138 points by gk1 5y ago

I bought a house in the past year and have become a regular at Home Depot. Now that I'm aware, I have noticed that I've had very little issue with their online search. And the site tells me exactly the aisle and bay # to get it

ethbr0 5y ago
Example of common sense HD decision: "Wait, why are we developing an app for our associates to locate items, when we could also just expose that to the customer themselves?"

mhb 5y ago

FTA: Instead of powering the search by attempting a direct one-to-one matching of keywords, a vector search engine attempts to match the input term to a vector, which is an array of features generated from objects in the catalog.

binarymax 5y ago

If you're into this kind of thing check out the #vectors-in-search channel at https://opensourceconnections.com/slack https://opensourceconnections.com/slack -- Us vector search nerds hang out there (and some of the Home Depot search nerds too) and share insights and ideas.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ethbr0 5y ago

Nice to see Huiming Qu getting a mention. Home Depot seemed to have a tradition of good, practical engineering when I was there. Emphasis on solving the problem incrementally and reliably, rather than trying to boil the ocean. (Disclaimer: Former employee)

doodlebugging 5y ago
As a long-time Home Depot customer who works on everything DIY (cars/gardens/home improvements/etc) I have found over the past few years that Home Depot search will consistently get me to the product that I am looking to buy or close enough that it is easy to comb through the results to refine the search. This is in stark contrast with Lowe's where I would describe the difference as being akin to searching via Google (Home Depot) or by Cuil (Lowe's). For those unfamiliar with Cuil: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/cuil-theory https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/cuil-theory If you know her please send some high praise from me. I am one of the people who has long experience with making things and knows several ways to describe common tools, materials, parts, etc but who hates to have to cycle through each of them hoping that the inventory management engine recognizes the product and lists it near the top when it delivers search results. As a customer, I could tell that results from Home Depot searches delivered quality results by a simple search for a 2x4 of a specific length. Excellent work!
- twothamendment 5y ago
  After building 3 houses, some of them doing all electrical, windows, doors, trim, flooring, paint and endless projects - I too have been impressed with the search results. Lowe's, on the other hand blows HD away with speed. HD could also work on their funky layout issues. On an up to date mobile chrome, sometimes it decides that I'm really on a desktop (no, I didn't hit desktop mode) and it renders what is nearly useless on a small screen.
  - doodlebugging 5y ago
    >On an up to date mobile chrome, sometimes it decides that I'm really on a desktop (no, I didn't hit desktop mode) and it renders what is nearly useless on a small screen. Thanks for reminding me of this. I'm still using a Windows phone. It will be obsoleted soon though, and I had blamed most of the poor rendering of HD site on a phone on the phone itself since I commonly get the "unsupported browser - please upgrade" messages from lots of sites. Like Best Buy, their mobile version is not good and borders on unusable. I had always blamed that on my own decision to use an obsolete phone as long as possible instead of on poor mobile website performance. I tend to locate the part that I need on my desktop, send a link or screenshot to my phone. That way I know which aisle/bin to find it once I make it to the store and don't have to waste time exploring all the things that I want but don't need. Lowe's does throw up search results a bit faster but to me, the time wasted trying to find the right combination of terms to use in searching is not worth the small price difference between the two stores. I buy from Lowe's when I am looking for a specific brand that is not carried at Home Depot.

throwaway984393 5y ago

This sounds a lot like semantic web search? Can anyone share how it differs?

ethbr0 5y ago
I'd guess that the primary difference is in the attribute space and specificity. Home Depot products are specific in odd ways. E.g. an 8' PVC pipe can be shortened on-site, a 3' downrod for a ceiling fan might not be able to. So substitutability is hard.
sp332 5y ago
The part at the beginning where employees manually loaded possible search terms sounds like the semantic web to me. This project uses deep learning to automatically direct a whole space of possible search terms to an item, instead of just missing all the terms that were not manually added.
simonhughes22 5y ago
I worked on the system. It's a similar idea but it's on e-commerce products and not websites. So you can't use things like page rank when doing product search.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  Well semantic web search is less about traditional web search and more about semantic relationships between terms using ontologies. If you search for "pipe A500", the search engine would deconstruct that. It would see pipes have steel, and a coating for steel, and a grade of steel. It would see A500 is a grade of steel. Pipes don't have a grade A500, but tubes do, and tubes have the other classifications that pipes do. It may then conclude that while 'A500' and 'pipe' are not linked directly, a different term may be very similar and a more direct match ('tube'), and thus return 'A500 tube' results. It seemed like the machine learning model was building relations between these different concepts and using them to improve the search, but without the intentional taxonomic mapping that semantic web uses. Semantic web is essentially more of a curated database of relationships, whereas the machine learning appears to be using another method to establish the relationships. I wonder if they're not doing basically the same thing.

raghavbali 5y ago

vector search is everywhere nowadays. Glad to see another success story. Kudos to the team

tbran 5y ago

I wish someone at Home Depot would fix come of their website's basic usability issues. The layout shifts, bad location UI, and slow speed really sour the experience. Interestingly, I recently did what I thought was a basic search for a 2'x4' piece of birch plywood and the results were pretty wonky. I ended up drilling down through menus instead. If you contrast this with McMaster Carr's website, you'll wonder what went wrong at HD. I've been ordering online from McMaster for probably close to two decades, and it's better in every way from speed to interface to product specs.

wil421 5y ago
I think the problem is the vendors loading different information into whatever platform they use. I’ve seen it at other retailers and customer support said the vendors load all the info, in my case she said they entered it wrong.
simonhughes22 5y ago
The results here look fine to me in positions 3 and 4 - https://www.homedepot.com/s/2'x4'%2520piece%2520of%2520birch%2520plywood?NCNI-5 https://www.homedepot.com/s/2'x4'%2520piece%2520of%2520birch... What are you expecting to see? I worked on this search engine so interested to get feedback, good or bad (bad is actually more useful!).
- fuzzer37 5y ago
  Well almost half the results on the page are 4x8's, when explicitly searching for 2x4's for one.
  - simonhughes22 5y ago
    It does semantic matching. We don't have a lot of exact matches for that search for birch wood (given the exact dimensions) so the engine broadens the search criteria automatically. You never want to just show exact matches, so long as they are ranked near the top over fuzzier matches. People often assume the search is bad if they see a lot of broader matches, without realizing that there might not be many perfect matches for the exact query given.

bradly 5y ago

I’m building a tool to measure, track, and improve search and AI models. If you’d like to beta test, please reach out!

adnmcq999 5y ago

I’m a sales associate at Home Depot - I have to look up items all the time. I usually just google “item Home Depot” This usually gets me the item or a similar item. If the item is similar and not what they want, I have a tree categorization and I can usually go up a level. The interesting problem w the Home Depot I think is figuring out how to categorize and when to make a category. For example “screws” is an obvious category in which there will be sub-categories and parameters on which to filter like “length” or “color” (I use this a lot). What filter parameters to have is also interesting as is how to display the results. Most items are returned in a list form but, annoyingly, some types of items have their own splash page that is kind of unique to that item. If the item is weird, it might be really hard to categorize, usually these go into _____ accessories. Overall I think Home Depot does a good job w the search except the UI is laggy as someone mentioned and as they also mentioned the location setting is ALWAYS WRONG. FIX THIS NOW! Every. Single. Time I have to check if an item is in stock at my store, it puts me in the wrong store and I have to manually change it myself. Am I just a moron or is there really no way to set it and forget it?

bagels 5y ago
The store location selector forgets all the time which you had selected last. What's best is it appears to try to infer location from ip address, so when you are in a home Depot on a mobile, it picks a different store from the one you are standing in.
- paulmd 5y ago
  I think a lot of stores incorporate a "cheater" mechanism where if you're on the store wifi they use that as the location. You could pick it up via IP or hardware MAC (even if you are on a VPN the local router still knows your MAC from when you passed the ToS accept portal). Doesn't help cell service of course, and cellular data clients are REALLY tricky to geolocate properly. Cell towers are often trunked a considerable distance (apparently?) so your IP can indicate you're quite far from your physical location. Pages really rely on the browser to cue location in that scenario, but of course many of us turn it off, and at that point you get what you get.

alexfromapex 5y ago

I think a lot of companies are going this direction now with search, what are you all finding are the best language models?

charliejuggler 5y ago

If you're interested in the detail behind this check out Simon Hughes' talk at our Haystack search relevance conference last year https://haystackconf.com/2021/ https://haystackconf.com/2021/ - the video is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWc4DOM-CHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWc4DOM-CHk . Haystack US 2022 is open for business (and talk submissions) too at www.haystackconf.com if you're into search!

zucked 5y ago

Home Depot does some things right and some things so poorly I wonder if it's intentional. Here's one I ran into just yesterday. I wanted to know the ballpark cost of a belt-driven garage door opener. So I google "home depot belt drive garage door opener". Landed on this page: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Openers/Belt-Drive/N-5yc1vZas5uZ1z0xxza https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Opener... So... where's the garage door openers? I know you carry them. No amount of modification of the search options surfaces any belt-driven garage door openers. Thinking I was crazy, I went up a category to "Garage Door Openers" and clicked the "Belt Drive" category at the top. Same result. WTH? I will say that the accurate listing of item location in the store has saved me hours and hours of wandering and even if I can't find the specific item I'm looking for (see above) I can look up generic garage door openers and find what aisle it's likely to be in.

fckgw 5y ago
That sounds more like Google sending you to the wrong page on Home Depot's site, no? If you punch in "belt drive garage door opener" on the actual Home Depot website it returns the results you want.
- zucked 5y ago
  It's a borked landing page, I suspect. Go up a product level: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Openers/N-5yc1vZas5u https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Opener... Click on "Belt Drive" among the Opener Types. Same result. Not terribly related to the topic at hand, but its definitely a gripe I have the the HD website sometimes works great and sometimes is terribly unhelpful.
ec109685 5y ago
Doesn't work: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Openers/Belt-Drive/N-5yc1vZas5uZ1z0xxza https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Opener... Works: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Openers/Belt-Drive/N-5yc1vZas5uZ1z1ttgx https://www.homedepot.com/b/Doors-Windows-Garage-Door-Opener... Also Works: https://www.homedepot.com/b/Does-Not-Matter/Does-Not-Matter/N-5yc1vZas5uZ1z1ttgx https://www.homedepot.com/b/Does-Not-Matter/Does-Not-Matter/... The "seo" part of the url doesn't actually matter. Where they went wrong is not redirecting a page that has no results to a one that does when SEO text matches.

coding123 5y ago

If anyone from Home Depot is there: I normally search for T&G Plywood and I get what I expect. Right now that search is broken at the & and it thinks my entire search string is just "T". Instead I have to enter "T&G Plywood" into the search - literally adding the html entity and that actually works correctly for the search.

simonhughes22 5y ago
Thanks that is definitely broken. Logging the issue right now.
- coding123 5y ago
  :heart:

dncornholio 5y ago

https://www.homedepot.com/ https://www.homedepot.com/ is showing a 403 forbidden page to me since GDPR hit. Such a spit in face left bad taste in my mouth. Not even a page that explains why, just the standard 403 page..

owenfi 5y ago

Now I just wish they would fix the search field so it would actually submit when I press return on my iPhone.

bombledmonk 5y ago

While I appreciate the sentiment of the topic of fuzziness and AI, this also breaks search for people who are looking for precision. For people who are used to a McMaster-Carr or Digi-Key style search where precision matters in results, the fuzziness introduces ambiguity and hampers repeatability. These are both very important when designing products. Amazon, Home Depot, and Lowes are a bear when trying to find something with very specific specifications, it's quite literally rage inducing to add a more specific keyword to q query and get more (wrong) results in the output.

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abanayev 5y ago

This is why Semantle is better than Wordle

sockaddr 5y ago

Lowes needs something similar. Their search is worse than useless. It commonly doesn't return relevant results that can be found by searching completely irrelevant terms. It's bizarre.

thirdtrigger 5y ago

Super cool article, we work on OSS vector search technology (Weaviate) as well and I can confirm that we see many similar use cases especially with multi-model models and rerankers.

cptskippy 5y ago

I hate this shit. I hate when companies try to optimize their results to what they think I want. I don't care if it's Home Depot or Amazon, nothing infuriates me more than searching for something I know exists and getting contextualized results that are not what I asked for. If you're going to do this, at the very least allow me to turn it off so I can see what I'm missing. I wanted to see if HD had a outdoor jbox extension ring in stock before I drove down there, so what did I search for? Well "outdoor jbox extension ring" of course. What did I get results for? A sprinkler spike, various types of romex, a Wyze flood light, and extension cord protectors. I guess at least now I know why their search is useless. * What would be helpful is knowing which terms, if any, didn't get hits. Maybe it was jbox and I need to type "junction box", idk. But providing me garbage results is just infuriating.

interestica 5y ago

> Home Depot has a list of IT projects that it wants to tackle I'm outside of Canada. Trying to go to homedepot.ca just gives me an 'Access Denied". I legitimately want to purchase things to send to people back home and cannot. There's not even some sort of graceful fallback. I don't understand the logic and wonder if it's just an honest IT routing mistake.

ffhhj 5y ago
That's interesting. A few months ago my father's credit card was charged by Home Depot in Canada, and we don't live in that country. It was certainly fraud, and the payment was reverted. Maybe their systems are compromised and that's the reason to deny foreign access?
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dtgriscom 5y ago
I just tried from the US (Massachusetts): worked just fine. (I let it have my location, and it suggested I shop in Sherbrooke, QC, which actually could be the closest Canadian HD to me.)
- interestica 5y ago
  I'm in the US Virgin islands and it exists in some sort of inbetween. (Google maps denies some access because it has erroneously labeled the 'country' code as VI) So yeah, it's kinda absurd to deny access. Not really sure how to fix the various errors I've encountered