12 ms·

Website search hurts my feelings

367 points by earthboundkid 3y ago

samirillian 3y ago
Tangential, but Librivox's search leaves a lot to be desired. I love that project, and can mostly just use Google, but it would be a great volunteer project for some good Samaritan with a little more experience enhancing search than me.
vasco 3y ago
If heads of product were forced to use their own products for a full afternoon every week the quality of the web would increase a lot. The amount of high level product people that can't demo their own product and cannot find features they hype up in slide decks is depressing.
- satyrnein 3y ago
  Not disagreeing, but this example seems like a data/tagging problem which is probably some other department.
  - vasco 3y ago
    Which would be flagged in the weekly review on the first week?
  - malfist 3y ago
    Data tagging makes Walmart throw a huge banner ad for pancakes into your search for lentils?
    - Zetobal 3y ago
      I mean if someone tags pancakes as lentils... that said we had great success by using gpt4-v for product tagging tbh. it really is a game changer.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Lentil pancakes are actually a thing to be fair.
    - marcinzm 3y ago
      The money from showing a pancake ad make them do that. It's not a search problem. They know it's not a good experience but they also know it makes them more money than not showing it. The goal is money. Your experience is merely a means to that end. The profit margins on selling products are abysmal for e-commerce. The profit margins on ads are amazing.
  - ellisv 3y ago
    Ideally, manufacturers and sellers would provide more, accurate information about products -- but I generally like how Google solved this within Google Maps via crowdsourcing by prompting users to answer questions about places (e.g. does this place have a wheelchair ramp?). I wish there was a better process to collect and store product information so it could be more easily shared.
  - pc86 3y ago
    And in any sane company, the minute a product person says "oh this egregious error is a problem for some other department" they'd be fired immediately, so it still sounds like a useful exercise. I'll be the first admit I don't have a ton of respect for the "product owner" role which has morphed largely into Tom Smykowski from Office Space[0] but the places I've seen them be actually effective and net positives for an organization are where they have the reach and authority to demand things like this be fixed, regardless of what department is "in charge." IMO a product owner who doesn't do this is refusing to do one of the few useful product owner roles. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/characters/nm0726223 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/characters/nm0726223
  - prepend 3y ago
    I’ve had good results with brute forcing tagging even when it’s not my job. If I use my product and hate it, I make it better. Knowing they some other department sucks for years is no good. I think all this boils down to companies not really giving a flip.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    The product is bad. Shifting the blame around doesn't magically make the product better.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  I've worked on products with ALL of these exact issues. The answer is usually that the data isn't annotated well enough, or that there are not enough developer resources to make special case fixes for things 99% of people don't notice or care about (and so are not losing us money, they just annoy us). At the companies I worked for, fixing these problems was not within the remit of the head of product, they were cross-departmental issues and so were in that pernicious category of problems that are highly resistant to change. I assume the reason you think product people are responsible for this is because you aren't a product person, but in my experience those are the people who most desperately want this type of shit to be fixed, because it makes them look like clowns.
  - vasco 3y ago
    The responsibility of a product person is that the product works well. This includes working with design and engineering partners as well as any data annotation departments. If the search experience is shit and the head of product doesn't think it's up to them, they aren't being responsible for the product.
  - whstl 3y ago
    The reason the responsibility for this is on heads of products is not because they're directly responsible for annotating, it's because they're responsible for knowing what can and will get annotated so the feature they asked for actually works. The work of product person shouldn't stop at the idea phase.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  In my experience it's not just about using a product but understanding how a product functions under the hood. Yelling "fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it" in a loop at random teams tends to not actually get things fixed. Instead you'll get a lot of blame shifting, a lot of random "projects" to improve things and in the end no improvement (or often an even worse experience). In other words you'll get corporate politics. Very few executives understand a modern search stack in anything resembling a useful level of detail much less how their teams map to it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bozhark 3y ago
Even web search sucks now
- mikro2nd 3y ago
  Depends to some degree which search engine you're using, even with all the so-called "AI" pissing in the soup.
  - trgn 3y ago
    I wish there still was decent boolean keyword search out there.
jddj 3y ago
I've never been lucky(?) enough to reach a scale or level of domain messiness where the standard method of indexing things naievely in elasticsearch or even typesense breaks down. Especially to such an extent as the umbrella example. What's the failure mode here? Microservices that "own their own data"?
- ckorhonen 3y ago
  The main failure mode here I find is nuances in more specialized datasets. Elasticsearch is great, powerful and easy to work with once you get the hang of it, but is very open-ended with lots of room to build a sub-optimal solution. Fuzzy matching and boosting often trip people up or lead to folks shooting themselves in the foot relevancy-wise. If you want really great results, you need to spend the time crafting your query, dealing with synonyms ("pop" vs. "soda"), stemming, typos, negative boosts ("non-alcoholic", in the example) etc. It's not necessarily hard, just often forgotten or not included in the initial scope.
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  Many if not most ecom sites will be using a vendor for search (e.g. Bloomreach) so they're sending a feed of product data to their vendor, just a subset of their product data (which may not have enough metadata for some facets people might reasonably expect). That means there's lag, and also that the integration is stiff and brittle, hard to change without time and money. Even then, whether they're rolling their own search or using a 3rd party, nine times out of ten their search will be ONLY for products, good luck if you wanted to search for a phrase from their privacy policy; for that or any sort of other non-product content you're forced to use Google/Bing/ddg etc.
dbetteridge 3y ago
I honestly don't understand how some websites have such awful search (Like these examples) You can get better results with a 5minute tsvector in Postgres, At least it will show the words you typed in in the results! And yes I understand it may be a different "scale" of products, but do people not test these things?
- monsieurbanana 3y ago
  I spent a couple of minutes thinking of a good example of search. Google? No more by a long shot, Amazon also a cesspool. Finder finds too many irrelevant files (no matter what I type it returns a huge list of node_modules matches), this one might be on me. Search on Windows I haven't bothered in years. The only search tools that actually give me great value are history shell with fzf on the terminal, and grep (and similar like ag or ripgrep) in combination with a fuzzy search frontend (similar to piping grep to fzf). I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess searching just sucks now.
  - miki123211 3y ago
    Launchbar on Mac and Everything on Windows are pretty great, though they solve very different problems.
  - kaibee 3y ago
    Newegg had (has? haven't used in a while) very good search categories for PC hardware.
  - Podgajski 3y ago
    Amazon is beyond frustrating. The amount of totally unrelated results to a search is so frustrating. And I mean totally unrelated.
- pimlottc 3y ago
  My cynical take is that they don’t care what you buy, as long as you buy something. So the more results, the better. Even if they don’t exactly match what you asked for. After all, the absolute worst thing to do would not show any (purchasable) results at all. If you want to get academic with it, you could say something about revealed preferences vs stated preferences (they asked for Coke but they really wanted Pepsi), but I really think they’re just throwing as many suggestions at the user as possible in the hopes they stay engaged on the site and eventually click buy on something.
alehlopeh 3y ago
[flagged]
okasaki 3y ago
Vaguely related but Firefox on android history search (well, autocomplete) is awful. n -> suggests nothing ne -> suggests news.ycombinator.com new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com news -> suggests nothing news. -> suggests nothing news.y -> suggests nothing news.yc -> suggests nothing news.yco -> suggests nothing news.ycom -> suggests nothing news.ycomb -> suggests nothing news.ycombi -> suggests nothing news.ycombin -> suggests nothing news.ycombina -> suggests nothing news.ycombinat -> suggests nothing news.ycombinato -> suggests nothing news.ycombinator -> suggests nothing news.ycombinator. -> suggests nothing news.ycombinator.c -> suggests nothing news.ycombinator.co -> suggests news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com -> suggests news.ycombinator.com huh???
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I do not understand this phenomenon where search boxes will stop presenting the phrase you want, after you’ve typed the next letter in the word. new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com news -> suggests nothing How does this happen? It is bizarre, it is the most frustrating little thing I can think of in computers, at least since USB became flip-able.
  - monsieurbanana 3y ago
    That's been on the back of my mind but I guess I chalked it up to a bug and didn't think too much about it. You're right though, this is incredibly dumb design.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    There is a logic, you type "n" and "news.yc[...].com" comes up, so when you type "ne" then you're presumably (the logic goes) looking for something other than the website that was just presented to you; otherwise you would have chosen that website already rather than continuing to search by adding more letters. In practice people type what they think will turn up the results "news", say, and don't look at the results until they're finished typing.
    - 3y ago
Gracana 3y ago
The one that really hurts my feelings is when the search function on a manufacturer’s website doesn’t recognize their own part numbers. Then I get angry and go to google, which gives me unrelated ad results instead. Ah, familiarity.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  Having previously worked for a company with this problem, sometimes you need to start pulling other people’s teeth to get them to stop putting data in random fields. We just told our customers to google the part number. I don’t know how these places stay in business.
  - pc86 3y ago
    I've never worked at a place where part numbers mattered, but I am very familiar with this mindset of non-technical people that basically boils down to "just put whatever you want in whatever text field then act befuddled when the system doesn't work perfectly."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
I've often fantasised about scraping Amazon just to be able to actually search on the site. eBay too, it's OK (compared to Amazon) but most of the items on a search are always "mousepad [or whatever] suitable for" the laptop you searched for. Why eBay don't clean up their categories and ban sellers I don't know, it makes the site so much worse to use. I wonder if anyone is _ever_ hoodwinked by the vast majority of sites that sort by Most Expensive by default? It's all part of enshittification presumably, these sites monitor so many metrics it must surely be a profit generator to make search frustratingly bad.
jzb 3y ago
My wife prefers to use curbside pickup for groceries, and orders via the Harris Teeter website. It’s a disaster. The site search picks up unrelated items, misses others, and so on. I would complain about the inventory management/substitutions too - but since they also have in store shoppers using the same inventory I guess they can’t always be 100% about what’s on the shelf. You’d think a chain that size could do better, but I doubt they have much incentive. The competition is minimal and not any better.
- gosub100 3y ago
  we're all looking at these as technical mistakes, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if, during A/B testing, people spend more when search doesn't quite work. For a similar reason as why they put milk in the back of the store. optimizing shoppers' efficiency doesn't optimize their profit.
- yurishimo 3y ago
  I used to work on a regional grocery chain's website (in the Southern USA) for online ordering and fulfillment. It's a constant battle. Consider the sheer number of products on store shelves. The average number of products is 30k+. Now, consider that some percentage of those are constantly in flux and potentially unique per store. Holiday items, promotions, marketing from suppliers, overflow, etc etc. Anytime a price is changed or a product brought in/out of stock, that line in the database needs to be updated. Product images and nutrition information can also be in flux as companies adjust their products in response to supply chain or financing particulars. At the end of the day, gathering and aggregating all of that crap into a stable API is a chore unto itself. Multiple people's jobs. Updating products, associating taxonomies, in-store locations, duplicate locations, optimizing pickup routes, etc etc etc. There is a lot of grunt work here that can't be entirely automated away when dealing such a dynamic business. Now you need to build a website that takes all of this data and somehow displays it in a format that is comprehensible and accurate for consumers. Showing relevant recommended products, search keywords, cache and image management (for potentially resizing dynamic supplier photos). Then think about the cart and checkout, two areas and Shopify and Amazon have devoted literal billions of dollars to optimize. Your volume is big enough that using an off the shelf payment provider is off the table; not to mention that you don't have the margins anyway. Have you thought about mobile apps and the development effort required there as well? Grocery stores are hard enough as is but doing them online is a totally different beast. There's a reason that all of the "Kroger" brands use the same exact website with a different logo in the corner. The only players in this space doing it reasonably well are huge conglomerates with money to burn on building the required infrastructure to build the audience. Actually, I just looked up Harris Teeter and they appear to be a Kroger brand as well. TIL. I would say that "Kroger" is one of the better ones. Whole Foods is also doing decently well if you can afford the price premium, but I realize for most people that isn't a luxury they can afford. The best way to get them to improve is to keep using the service and demanding better (or use a competitor if available). These departments have KPIs. If you get the wrong product, file a complaint at the end of your order process and mark any NPS surveys appropriately. If fulfillment has a lot of bad data from elsewhere in the organization driving their performance scores down, then they are incentivized to get it fixed. I know it sucks, but the only other alternative is to not use it at all and risk is going away forever.
gniv 3y ago
On the other end of the spectrum, I've been impressed by Netflix search. I would search a name and they do not have that movie, but would suggest a mix of similar movies, movies with the same actors or director. It's pretty clever, I just wish they were more explicit about it, as in showing the reasoning behind choosing a result.
- pknerd 3y ago
  Do not want to miss a chance to empty your pockets
  - eatonphil 3y ago
    That doesn't make a ton of sense in the Netflix case since presumably it's actually more expensive for every additional movie you watch since your subscription price is fixed and each additional movie you watch costs bandwidth and compute?
    - pknerd 3y ago
      I will get bored if I am not exposed to what is available on the platform and will get unsubscribed. It's like social feed of a social media platform
    - madeofpalk 3y ago
      On the other hand, people that don't watch any content are at the highest risk of cancelling their membership.
    - lukevp 3y ago
      Netflix wants you to justify the cost in your mind. The bandwidth is free. Netflix is such a high volume of internet traffic that the CDNs actually have edge content caches within the DCs of most major ISPs, so when you stream you’re actually streaming from a box at your ISP (or a cross connect to Netflix) and not costing Netflix any internet-facing bandwidth besides API calls. This setup is cheaper for everyone because the ISP doesn’t have to subscribe as large of an internet pipe because the high bandwidth streaming is siphoned off into private networking and never leaves the DC.
chefandy 3y ago
While the overall point holds true, some of the complaints don't make sense. Searching "rice" for example will probably get you parboiled white rice, instant red beans and rice, chicken and rice canned soup, and rice pudding— many of those facets make prefect sense. If you were searching for rice paper for crafting, or even "nuts," that "food" facet would be plenty useful. You can't look at one narrow usage path to judge an interface. You can only customize the interface so much for specific use cases before it becomes confusing as hell to use because it lacks consistency between tasks.
- latch 3y ago
  The complaint about "rice" is that the tagging is incomplete. "vegan" isn't a bad facet, but the count is wrong. When you select "vegan", most vegan products are removed. I don't see how filtering wrong data isn't a valid complaint. The problem is obviously that the data isn't tagged. But Costco is huge, profitable and doesn't have a huge inventory, so why can't they tag it? And if the tags are so incomplete, maybe it's better not to include them?
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Tagging products sounds like something a LLM could do rather well with just a little human supervision.
    - binarymax 3y ago
      Have worked on this and it’s between 60 and 90% OK in my experiments. You run into lots of fun issues because people don’t write titles and descriptions for machines, they write them to appeal to human emotions to close a sale.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Searching "rice" for example will probably get you parboiled white rice, instant red beans and rice, chicken and rice canned soup, and rice pudding— many of those facets make perfect sense. Well, no, if I ask for rice, the odds are overwhelming that I'm looking for rice, in which case chicken and rice canned soup is a totally inappropriate response. It would make as much sense as returning alcohol-free wine when asked for "alcohol".
4pkjai 3y ago
There’s a restaurant website in Hong Kong that lets you search by region. However it shows restaurants that paid to be featured at the top of the results. So the search results will often contain restaurants that are multiple hours away.
- WaitWaitWha 3y ago
  To some extent, this is consistent with Google's mobile Maps version when searching for anything. It returns "Relevance" by default, not by "Distance". I also noticed the same in several other website where "relevance" trumps my sort request (e.g., price, distance).
  - core-utility 3y ago
    I hate this with a passion. I can be out somewhere, knowing that there's likely a McDonald's nearby. I zoom in to my location, type in McDonald's, and it zooms out to a 25 mile radius to show me every single McDonald's in the area including the one 0.1 miles away (that I then have to zoom all the way back into to get)
    - grogenaut 3y ago
      More favorite of mine is then it decides to fire up the first time user experience for some new features for you or shift into driving mode you thought you disabled. The you click what you think is the nearest MCD and it's the one close as the crow flies and on the other side of the freeway so 3 miles away. Search along route sometimes works better and sometimes also zooms out.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  The last time I used Craigslist to apartment hunt, people spam the listings with the name of places 30 minutes away for some reason, as though I would just give up on living in the neighborhood I was searching for if I saw there was something somewhere completely different at a price that wasn't even that good.
gumby 3y ago
These are hilarious and infuriating but also, perhaps, correct? My gf (who used to work in the sector) says a lot of people like to sit in front of the TV and “watch what’s on” — one of the reasons broadcast TV still exists. You see this with sites like Netflix becoming decreasingly useful, urging you to simply click on something rather than consult your curated watch list. Some of them now hide your watch list! She suggests the same applies to shopping: some people just want to push the buy button, which is well known in brick and mortar retail, especially low margin ones like grocery shops: end caps, mid shelves and all sorts of other strategies are used to get you to either buy on impulse or buy the version they’d rather sell of what you have in mind. So for these sites the same applies: show a few options and the customer will simply pick one. Spam the tags, DWIM the customer’s ill-formed, uninformed, or simply unsatisfiable query, and see if the punter buys. For nerds like us this is a pessimization. But perhaps for the majority this works better.
- pc86 3y ago
  I've noticed a lot of streaming services will inconsistently show your watch list and/or show it in different locations on the home screen. I've long wondered if it's a mix of certain services just not being available or taking too long to respond when loading the lolomo (to use Netflix's term) and automated A/B tests trying to maximize some metric other than "starts watching something."
- pixl97 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice Mentally when I'm at a store and I have 3 options to pick from I seemingly enjoy the process better then if I had 6 or 10. Eventually the picking itself becomes work. If it's a topic I enjoy like motherboards or RAM then all the choices are fine, I can spend hours on that, but if I'm picking tomato sauce for a quick and sloppy dish I don't want to spend the time selecting.
- mmahemoff 3y ago
  Yep. YouTube search has become smart about this, blending search with browsing. It typically gives you a handful of reasonably close matches, followed by a whole lot of wildly offtopic suggestions based on subscriptions, watch history, or who even knows. And this happens even when there would be more relevant results to show, i.e., there's not even a pretence of trying to give the N most relevant results. The game is to populate search with whatever users will click on.
flenserboy 3y ago
The point of website search (at least on commerce sites) is not to help the users find what they're searching for, but to put other, possibly related, products in front of their eyes. On most sites drilling down through limiters falls apart after about the third or fourth restriction is chosen, often because the sites seem designed to not give three or four clear choices (which is what the user wants to see), but ten or more vaguely related items (is this due to the fear that giving three or four results will imply that the site has a shortage of items to choose from?). Keep marketers & managers away from site design.
- pixl97 3y ago
  I may be wrong, but my guess is the site makes its money off those 'promoted' search terms of most popular/most profitable items and the work needed for the long tail doesn't seem worth it for most teams.
- binarymax 3y ago
  It’s both. What you’re referring to is “searchandizing”, and it’s a component of e-commerce for sure. But if you’re not also retrieving what the customer wants you’ll just piss them off and they’ll shop elsewhere.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  It's the digital equivalent of putting the cans of nacho cheese dip on a little rack in front of the shelves of tortilla chips.
  - flenserboy 3y ago
    I can see that. It feels more like the car salesman who says, "Sure, you can look at the car you actually came here to see, but only after I show you three more we'd prefer to sell."
  - travoc 3y ago
    It’s more like asking the clerk where to find the fruit salad and him giving you directions to strawberry ice cream.
nateburke 3y ago
Fixing this is the promise of enterprise deployments of LLMs, correct? That you can take the list of initial result texts from a shitty elasticsearch implementation, pass it into an LLM with a prompt "you are a user looking for <query>, please use common sense to comb through these results and find a few good ones" and get better intramural search quality. The only other enterprise application I am aware of is applying the homework cheating app to customer facing roles that require email/copy generation.
- regularjack 3y ago
  Implementing search correctly would solve the problem too, without requiring a square kilometer of GPUs.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    Right but implementing search correctly often means humans combing through the data and applying common sense to tag the products with their actual facets. So really you're just choosing between a square kilometer of office space for cheap labor or GPUs.
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      > you're just choosing between a square kilometer of office space for cheap labor or GPUs. No, with LLMs you're getting both, because a. LLMs need the human-curated data to ingest and b. after training the model is going to get RLHF. Also, a square kilometer of office space still uses much less electricity than a square kilometer of GPUs.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    I'm guessing we're at or very near the point where LLMs could tag the data better and cheaper than humans.
  - lukevp 3y ago
    If you have >100k items, “implementing search correctly” is an intractable problem if you don’t have a hundred person team of search relevance optimizers and taggers. Search is terrible until you gather tons of metadata about each item. Search is not nearly as simple as text matching within product titles. An LLM by comparison is peanuts. You could run it overnight and just have it build tags and metadata for all your items and it would probably be 75% accurate and a hell of a lot cheaper. Things can then be fine tuned by people later.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
Feels like there's a pretty widespread problem that goes something like this: * PO: We need search! * PM to architect: Google how to implement search! * Architect: googles "best search library 2023 java" Aha! Let's use Elasticsearch! * PM to Team: Alright, I need a search feature next sprint. Architect googled for 5 minutes and says we should use elasticsearch! * Team: Alright, integrating elasticsearch in a sprint should work. Bob, you work on loading the data, Eve, you work on rendering the search results. * Team (2-3 weeks later): Another successful value delivery! Alright, what's next PM? * PM: PO says we need a chat bot... If it's not obvious why this is a problem, getting search to work well requires a lot of tweaking and tuning. You can't just slap a search engine into a product and expect it to work well. It's hilariously incompatible with the assembly line style of work that many software outfits employ these days. It also requires deep understanding of what a search engine does and how its algorithms work.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  Intellectually, I knew this was common but I never stopped to consider how fortunate I am to work for a company who understands things like search are difficult. It helps we have two internal departments whose primary jobs are data management and analysis. (Real statistics, not “AI”.)
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  There are actually plenty of non-ES products that are way easier to integrate and tune (and get better results with less effort). - Typesense (https://github.com/typesense/typesense https://github.com/typesense/typesense) - Algolia - Google Programmable Search Engine (https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/ https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/)
- eusto 3y ago
  It's more about what the company considers core business and what not. Most often they don't see the website as being important enough to the business so they don't invest in it. We have gotten used to almost flawless experiences from amazon shopping. Google search finds (or used to) results sometimes almost like magic, etc. The thing is, that's the core business. These companies invent new technologies and have huge teams because doing this is so hard. Now take a random supermarket chain. Their knowledge is about physical stores. Their core business has taught them where to open a store and how to arrange things in it so that they maximize their sales in that environment. It's very hard and it takes a very long time to shift to an online model. You have to find people with the right competencies and the right leadership to convince the company to do this and this is actually very hard to do. Look at the categories example. That, to me, screams backend database. The company has invested a lot of money into building business intelligence on top of their physical stores. That organization screams "perfectly curated data warehouse" and I imagine suggesting something like "we need to reorganize the way we store data" is going to be met with blank stares if not full on outrage.
rascul 3y ago
A little bit related, I wish web sites would stop hijacking the keys for my browser's search function.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- andirk 3y ago
  Almost every hijacking of keyboard and other default behaviors of our peripherals is lazy and arrogant UI. One exception is auto focusing on a search input element where that view is only used for that search box. Even then it's annoying because my browser back/forward via keyboard (cmd-left, cmd-right) gets hijacked by the focus.
renewiltord 3y ago
All this is unavoidable. But it's also temporary. This phase of search won't last since we're going to replace it with just SKU + inventory plus some fulltext search plus an LLM. An LLM browser assistant could probably solve this problem quite well. Inventory will never be well-tagged. The process change to ensure it would slow down procurement. Ideally, they'd expose an inventory XML list and we'd just use our LLM on it. The hard part is how to incentivize by permitting them control over advertising. An alternative is the browser LLM just searching across the page (Arc Browser can do this).
squarefoot 3y ago
One thing for sure is that shitty search algorithms in a page showing ads before search results, have the useful side effect of forcing users to refine search, exposing them to more ads before they find what they were searching for.
ano-ther 3y ago
Tagging ins tedious. Especially when it’s not you who searches but lots of other people, all with their specific ways of describing what they are looking for. And yes, the results are between amusing, annoying and infuriating. The “alcohol” example finding mostly comes from alcohol free products advertising this feature in their name - no need to name your regular beer or wine “with alcohol”, at least not in the product name.
- nox100 3y ago
  tagging doesn't work period because people will tag things to try to get their product in front of your eyes and add any tag they think is popular entirely unrelated to their "product".
  - Solvency 3y ago
    So why not punish them and have bots regularly scan/assess tags for relevance.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Leaving myself a note here for when I'm back behind a computer. I'm wondering how well something like GPT-4 generates tags with a product description/product image. Be interesting to see its accuracy and comprehensiveness.
plz-remove-card 3y ago
On officedepot.com when searching for a produect I have found no way to filter by "in stock at my chosen store" you have to search, then click through each individual item. The one and only reason I am considering office depot as a place to spend my money is because they're local and I can go get whatever cable or thing I need, right now.
- ruined 3y ago
  analytics have confirmed that surfacing inventory status is bad for the customer because it reduces conversion
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ljdtt 3y ago
    Interesting. Do you have sources to read more about it?
  - lukevp 3y ago
    Bad for the store you mean? Because the customer doesn’t convert (buy) something if it says “hurry only 1 left in stock” because everyone knows that store inventory is inaccurate and they ultimately don’t have 1 in stock, they have 0 in stock?
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      The way I interpret the comment, it says this: A. [explicit claim; humorous] Analytics confirm that, if you show people whether products are in stock locally, they won't buy those products on your website. B. [by implication] This is bad, because it "lowers" your sales. So you can't display this information. C. [by implication] The retailers are making a mistake - the reason people don't buy products on the website when availability information is displayed is that they go to the store and buy the product there. D. [summing up] If you measure something you don't care about, you will end up doing things that make you look like an idiot.
DonHopkins 3y ago
That's what you get when your AI Powered Search system is implemented by Web3 Experts who just pivoted to AI.
binarymax 3y ago
Love this article. Worked as a search relevance consultant for years and these are exactly the problems we work on. Most of the time fixing search is a thankless job. People expect it to work and when it does they take it for granted, but when it doesn’t it damages your reputation and brand. If you want to get started fixing website search relevance I recommend the books “Relevant Search” by Turnbull and Berryman, and “AI Powered Search” by Grainger, Turnbull, and yours truly. Both published by Manning.
- bonecrusher2102 3y ago
  Yep I work on Search as well -- both of these books are excellent. Website search is... hard. A lot of the faceting still needs to be done by hand. I think there's probably some opportunity for LLMs to make some sort of autotagging/categorization easier, but there will likely still need to be a human in the loop to verify.
- lukevp 3y ago
  Great recommendation on Relevant Search. I worked on an ecom site trying to improve search relevance for years, and it’s an incredibly difficult and challenging problem. Especially because it’s difficult to measure success, and execs would constantly come up with “hey why does this query not return exactly the results I expected” which led to a lot of resources spent optimizing a handful of queries based on executive input instead of based on query frequency and query result conversion metrics.
- Solvency 3y ago
  I'm not trying to fix search so what's the tldr on why it's so hard to do with such constrained databases? The Nintendo one seems insanely egregious. Is this not just a symptom of corporate laziness rather than search problem complexity?
  - binarymax 3y ago
    The searchable content may be constrained, but the queries aren’t ;) Search is hard because you need to anticipate and model the language of all potential searchers and the content. There’s also lots of ambiguity because you’ll only get one or two keywords from the searcher without any other context, and you need to take into account trends and content quality and metadata. Also, in lots of cases search is bad because the product team either doesn’t know or doesn’t care.
Turing_Machine 3y ago
Years ago, I cobbled up a simple search engine for some FOSS web forum software, mainly for people who were running private instances behind login walls -- i.e., stuff that public search engines couldn't crawl. Someone complained that for public instances, Google worked better (this was back before Google started to suck). My response was that if I could write a better search engine than Google in my spare time, I'd be living a lifestyle considerably more luxurious than the one I actually had. :-)
jklinger410 3y ago
I have a hot take that Walmart is actually slowly going out of business. They don't do big box retailer stuff well (behind glass), they don't do local grocery well, and they don't even do discounted items well (5 below, Temu). Their stores are garbage and they are asleep at the wheel on their website. It is only a matter of time.
- travoc 3y ago
  All of these things have been true since the beginning of Walmart. Yet here they are, almost the largest retailer on earth.
andirk 3y ago
I'm currently working on a website search for e-commerce and wow there really is no end to what website search can and should do. The ANDs and the ORs are kind of confusing too. Is it AND between category selections, and OR within? And did anyone else notice the omission of that useless copyright line at the bottom of websites as if we know anything about copyright law?
jwr 3y ago
I can explain this. About 15 years ago or so, together with a friend, we started a company whose goal was to offer a working product search for E-commerce. Faceting was just one aspect of the problem, a much more pressing issue for non-English speaking countries is that you need a way to deal with declension and various misspellings (especially from people that do not enter accented characters). So we did. Solve the problems, that is. With a pretty good SaaS offering, reasonably easy to integrate into any E-commerce site. And then we discovered that you can have a great product, but selling it is an entirely different problem, and we were not able to solve that problem. It turned out we were competing with marketing budgets: a customer (E-commerce site) could either pay us and improve the customer experience significantly, or they could spend this money on customer acquisition and improve the bottom line right away. Guess which approach won. Another realization was that customer experience might actually not matter much. People are used to crappy websites and will jump through all sorts of hoops if the price is low. So many of our potential customers preferred to pay for customer leads (price comparison sites) and offer low prices, rather than improve customer experience, because customer loyalty isn't necessarily a thing these days. Also, if your main acquisition channel is price comparison sites (which is the case in many countries), you don't care about search: customers will land directly on product pages (where the price is right) and will endure the crappy search to add some stuff to their carts. We ended up with a bunch of happy customers who stayed with the product for years, but we stopped trying to sell it and moved to other things, it was just too hard to sell. In other words, addressing the OP's (excellent) article: your hurt feelings don't matter much, and nobody really cares, as long as the customer acquisition funnel works and there is a steady increase in the bottom line numbers.
- jrm4 3y ago
  Perfect. While I've never been as deep in the details, my perpetual answer here is: "You're so vain, I bet you think this search is about you?" I understand it because people are human, but I can't help but feel annoyance when people are like "the search engine isn't doing what I want!" It's not designed to DO THAT, it's designed to maximize it's own sales and we're pretty much at the point where we should try to stop pretending otherwise.
  - 3y ago
AmazingTurtle 3y ago
To be fair, he searched for "laundry detergent" and sorted Name A-Z and was wondering why only 3M stuff appeared. Also I failed to comprehend this one > Of course the list of switch games isn't under Games > Nintendo Switch Games that would be silly. Well.. There is a list of games when you open Games > Nintento Switch Games. What is he complaining about?
- xigoi 3y ago
  > There is a list of games when you open Games > Nintento Switch Games. What is he complaining about? That the list doesn’t contain all Nintendo Switch games that the site offers and there doesn’t seem to be any clear reason why those particular 120 games were chosen.
- latch 3y ago
  If it's supposed to be sorted by name, why does "Ariel Oxy Bleach..." show up before "2-Fold Umbrella..." but "Ariel Antibac Jumbo" shows up after. This isn't just bad search, it's objectively wrong (and a lot more basic).
scotty79 3y ago
I would really love if there was some browser built-in skinnable system for lists that lets the user control ordering of the list and information visibility on the list, also filtering and grouping. There should be a movement for solutions that put power in the hands of the user.
croisillon 3y ago
I would try and install millions of apps on my iphone if the appstore was properly searchable, alas it’s not and i have like 10 apps installed
spcebar 3y ago
Faceting is a deceptively hard problem to solve because it requires understanding the features of the products within the categories of products within the ecosystem of products a seller is selling, and dividing them up based on how a customer is likely to be thinking about the products. If you're selling clothing, the customer is likely going to mean something different with the word "long" than they would mean if they were searching for foods. Within different categories of clothing the word "long" is going to mean different things.
DarkSucker 3y ago
Industry, please give us good search tools like those for researching articles: ("fog" near "coastline") AND ("lighthouse"). Or that offer regular expressions so I can search with precision. I got used to good search tools in grad school, and then came Google. And ever since I've not gotten better than a result salad. Sometimes a tasty salad, but still a salad. And, to be complete, firms like Nerac offer good search tools, but you need to work with someone who performs the search for you (last I used them).
welzel 3y ago
I have worked on very large e-Commerce sites and it seems there are 2 common issues: #1 a lot of teams are understaffed, overworked an not aligned, improving search is simply not a priority (at the same times, a lot of people are bored out of their mind, because of inefficient allocation of capacities). And of course, usable analytics data on search does not exist as it is hard to collect... #2 search might be actually ok, but the quality of the catalog data is a nightmare - and the catalog is maintenance by a tiny team that overworked and underpaid. To add injury to insult, there is also no clear accountability established and 5 departments and a couple of vendors play the "not my problem" game. Sometimes 10-30% of the catalog is renewed every year and people gave up a long time ago to report problems.

367 points by earthboundkid 3y ago

Tangential, but Librivox's search leaves a lot to be desired. I love that project, and can mostly just use Google, but it would be a great volunteer project for some good Samaritan with a little more experience enhancing search than me.

vasco 3y ago

If heads of product were forced to use their own products for a full afternoon every week the quality of the web would increase a lot. The amount of high level product people that can't demo their own product and cannot find features they hype up in slide decks is depressing.

satyrnein 3y ago
Not disagreeing, but this example seems like a data/tagging problem which is probably some other department.
- vasco 3y ago
  Which would be flagged in the weekly review on the first week?
- malfist 3y ago
  Data tagging makes Walmart throw a huge banner ad for pancakes into your search for lentils?
  - Zetobal 3y ago
    I mean if someone tags pancakes as lentils... that said we had great success by using gpt4-v for product tagging tbh. it really is a game changer.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Lentil pancakes are actually a thing to be fair.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    The money from showing a pancake ad make them do that. It's not a search problem. They know it's not a good experience but they also know it makes them more money than not showing it. The goal is money. Your experience is merely a means to that end. The profit margins on selling products are abysmal for e-commerce. The profit margins on ads are amazing.
- ellisv 3y ago
  Ideally, manufacturers and sellers would provide more, accurate information about products -- but I generally like how Google solved this within Google Maps via crowdsourcing by prompting users to answer questions about places (e.g. does this place have a wheelchair ramp?). I wish there was a better process to collect and store product information so it could be more easily shared.
- pc86 3y ago
  And in any sane company, the minute a product person says "oh this egregious error is a problem for some other department" they'd be fired immediately, so it still sounds like a useful exercise. I'll be the first admit I don't have a ton of respect for the "product owner" role which has morphed largely into Tom Smykowski from Office Space[0] but the places I've seen them be actually effective and net positives for an organization are where they have the reach and authority to demand things like this be fixed, regardless of what department is "in charge." IMO a product owner who doesn't do this is refusing to do one of the few useful product owner roles. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/characters/nm0726223 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/characters/nm0726223
- prepend 3y ago
  I’ve had good results with brute forcing tagging even when it’s not my job. If I use my product and hate it, I make it better. Knowing they some other department sucks for years is no good. I think all this boils down to companies not really giving a flip.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  The product is bad. Shifting the blame around doesn't magically make the product better.
karaterobot 3y ago
I've worked on products with ALL of these exact issues. The answer is usually that the data isn't annotated well enough, or that there are not enough developer resources to make special case fixes for things 99% of people don't notice or care about (and so are not losing us money, they just annoy us). At the companies I worked for, fixing these problems was not within the remit of the head of product, they were cross-departmental issues and so were in that pernicious category of problems that are highly resistant to change. I assume the reason you think product people are responsible for this is because you aren't a product person, but in my experience those are the people who most desperately want this type of shit to be fixed, because it makes them look like clowns.
- vasco 3y ago
  The responsibility of a product person is that the product works well. This includes working with design and engineering partners as well as any data annotation departments. If the search experience is shit and the head of product doesn't think it's up to them, they aren't being responsible for the product.
- whstl 3y ago
  The reason the responsibility for this is on heads of products is not because they're directly responsible for annotating, it's because they're responsible for knowing what can and will get annotated so the feature they asked for actually works. The work of product person shouldn't stop at the idea phase.
marcinzm 3y ago
In my experience it's not just about using a product but understanding how a product functions under the hood. Yelling "fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it" in a loop at random teams tends to not actually get things fixed. Instead you'll get a lot of blame shifting, a lot of random "projects" to improve things and in the end no improvement (or often an even worse experience). In other words you'll get corporate politics. Very few executives understand a modern search stack in anything resembling a useful level of detail much less how their teams map to it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bozhark 3y ago

Even web search sucks now

mikro2nd 3y ago
Depends to some degree which search engine you're using, even with all the so-called "AI" pissing in the soup.
- trgn 3y ago
  I wish there still was decent boolean keyword search out there.

jddj 3y ago

I've never been lucky(?) enough to reach a scale or level of domain messiness where the standard method of indexing things naievely in elasticsearch or even typesense breaks down. Especially to such an extent as the umbrella example. What's the failure mode here? Microservices that "own their own data"?

ckorhonen 3y ago
The main failure mode here I find is nuances in more specialized datasets. Elasticsearch is great, powerful and easy to work with once you get the hang of it, but is very open-ended with lots of room to build a sub-optimal solution. Fuzzy matching and boosting often trip people up or lead to folks shooting themselves in the foot relevancy-wise. If you want really great results, you need to spend the time crafting your query, dealing with synonyms ("pop" vs. "soda"), stemming, typos, negative boosts ("non-alcoholic", in the example) etc. It's not necessarily hard, just often forgotten or not included in the initial scope.
blacksmith_tb 3y ago
Many if not most ecom sites will be using a vendor for search (e.g. Bloomreach) so they're sending a feed of product data to their vendor, just a subset of their product data (which may not have enough metadata for some facets people might reasonably expect). That means there's lag, and also that the integration is stiff and brittle, hard to change without time and money. Even then, whether they're rolling their own search or using a 3rd party, nine times out of ten their search will be ONLY for products, good luck if you wanted to search for a phrase from their privacy policy; for that or any sort of other non-product content you're forced to use Google/Bing/ddg etc.

dbetteridge 3y ago

I honestly don't understand how some websites have such awful search (Like these examples) You can get better results with a 5minute tsvector in Postgres, At least it will show the words you typed in in the results! And yes I understand it may be a different "scale" of products, but do people not test these things?

monsieurbanana 3y ago
I spent a couple of minutes thinking of a good example of search. Google? No more by a long shot, Amazon also a cesspool. Finder finds too many irrelevant files (no matter what I type it returns a huge list of node_modules matches), this one might be on me. Search on Windows I haven't bothered in years. The only search tools that actually give me great value are history shell with fzf on the terminal, and grep (and similar like ag or ripgrep) in combination with a fuzzy search frontend (similar to piping grep to fzf). I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess searching just sucks now.
- miki123211 3y ago
  Launchbar on Mac and Everything on Windows are pretty great, though they solve very different problems.
- kaibee 3y ago
  Newegg had (has? haven't used in a while) very good search categories for PC hardware.
- Podgajski 3y ago
  Amazon is beyond frustrating. The amount of totally unrelated results to a search is so frustrating. And I mean totally unrelated.
pimlottc 3y ago
My cynical take is that they don’t care what you buy, as long as you buy something. So the more results, the better. Even if they don’t exactly match what you asked for. After all, the absolute worst thing to do would not show any (purchasable) results at all. If you want to get academic with it, you could say something about revealed preferences vs stated preferences (they asked for Coke but they really wanted Pepsi), but I really think they’re just throwing as many suggestions at the user as possible in the hopes they stay engaged on the site and eventually click buy on something.

alehlopeh 3y ago

[flagged]

okasaki 3y ago

Vaguely related but Firefox on android history search (well, autocomplete) is awful. n -> suggests nothing ne -> suggests news.ycombinator.com new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com news -> suggests nothing news. -> suggests nothing news.y -> suggests nothing news.yc -> suggests nothing news.yco -> suggests nothing news.ycom -> suggests nothing news.ycomb -> suggests nothing news.ycombi -> suggests nothing news.ycombin -> suggests nothing news.ycombina -> suggests nothing news.ycombinat -> suggests nothing news.ycombinato -> suggests nothing news.ycombinator -> suggests nothing news.ycombinator. -> suggests nothing news.ycombinator.c -> suggests nothing news.ycombinator.co -> suggests news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com -> suggests news.ycombinator.com huh???

bee_rider 3y ago
I do not understand this phenomenon where search boxes will stop presenting the phrase you want, after you’ve typed the next letter in the word. new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com news -> suggests nothing How does this happen? It is bizarre, it is the most frustrating little thing I can think of in computers, at least since USB became flip-able.
- monsieurbanana 3y ago
  That's been on the back of my mind but I guess I chalked it up to a bug and didn't think too much about it. You're right though, this is incredibly dumb design.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  There is a logic, you type "n" and "news.yc[...].com" comes up, so when you type "ne" then you're presumably (the logic goes) looking for something other than the website that was just presented to you; otherwise you would have chosen that website already rather than continuing to search by adding more letters. In practice people type what they think will turn up the results "news", say, and don't look at the results until they're finished typing.
  - 3y ago

Gracana 3y ago

The one that really hurts my feelings is when the search function on a manufacturer’s website doesn’t recognize their own part numbers. Then I get angry and go to google, which gives me unrelated ad results instead. Ah, familiarity.

kayodelycaon 3y ago
Having previously worked for a company with this problem, sometimes you need to start pulling other people’s teeth to get them to stop putting data in random fields. We just told our customers to google the part number. I don’t know how these places stay in business.
- pc86 3y ago
  I've never worked at a place where part numbers mattered, but I am very familiar with this mindset of non-technical people that basically boils down to "just put whatever you want in whatever text field then act befuddled when the system doesn't work perfectly."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

pbhjpbhj 3y ago

I've often fantasised about scraping Amazon just to be able to actually search on the site. eBay too, it's OK (compared to Amazon) but most of the items on a search are always "mousepad [or whatever] suitable for" the laptop you searched for. Why eBay don't clean up their categories and ban sellers I don't know, it makes the site so much worse to use. I wonder if anyone is _ever_ hoodwinked by the vast majority of sites that sort by Most Expensive by default? It's all part of enshittification presumably, these sites monitor so many metrics it must surely be a profit generator to make search frustratingly bad.

jzb 3y ago

My wife prefers to use curbside pickup for groceries, and orders via the Harris Teeter website. It’s a disaster. The site search picks up unrelated items, misses others, and so on. I would complain about the inventory management/substitutions too - but since they also have in store shoppers using the same inventory I guess they can’t always be 100% about what’s on the shelf. You’d think a chain that size could do better, but I doubt they have much incentive. The competition is minimal and not any better.

gosub100 3y ago
we're all looking at these as technical mistakes, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if, during A/B testing, people spend more when search doesn't quite work. For a similar reason as why they put milk in the back of the store. optimizing shoppers' efficiency doesn't optimize their profit.
yurishimo 3y ago
I used to work on a regional grocery chain's website (in the Southern USA) for online ordering and fulfillment. It's a constant battle. Consider the sheer number of products on store shelves. The average number of products is 30k+. Now, consider that some percentage of those are constantly in flux and potentially unique per store. Holiday items, promotions, marketing from suppliers, overflow, etc etc. Anytime a price is changed or a product brought in/out of stock, that line in the database needs to be updated. Product images and nutrition information can also be in flux as companies adjust their products in response to supply chain or financing particulars. At the end of the day, gathering and aggregating all of that crap into a stable API is a chore unto itself. Multiple people's jobs. Updating products, associating taxonomies, in-store locations, duplicate locations, optimizing pickup routes, etc etc etc. There is a lot of grunt work here that can't be entirely automated away when dealing such a dynamic business. Now you need to build a website that takes all of this data and somehow displays it in a format that is comprehensible and accurate for consumers. Showing relevant recommended products, search keywords, cache and image management (for potentially resizing dynamic supplier photos). Then think about the cart and checkout, two areas and Shopify and Amazon have devoted literal billions of dollars to optimize. Your volume is big enough that using an off the shelf payment provider is off the table; not to mention that you don't have the margins anyway. Have you thought about mobile apps and the development effort required there as well? Grocery stores are hard enough as is but doing them online is a totally different beast. There's a reason that all of the "Kroger" brands use the same exact website with a different logo in the corner. The only players in this space doing it reasonably well are huge conglomerates with money to burn on building the required infrastructure to build the audience. Actually, I just looked up Harris Teeter and they appear to be a Kroger brand as well. TIL. I would say that "Kroger" is one of the better ones. Whole Foods is also doing decently well if you can afford the price premium, but I realize for most people that isn't a luxury they can afford. The best way to get them to improve is to keep using the service and demanding better (or use a competitor if available). These departments have KPIs. If you get the wrong product, file a complaint at the end of your order process and mark any NPS surveys appropriately. If fulfillment has a lot of bad data from elsewhere in the organization driving their performance scores down, then they are incentivized to get it fixed. I know it sucks, but the only other alternative is to not use it at all and risk is going away forever.

gniv 3y ago

On the other end of the spectrum, I've been impressed by Netflix search. I would search a name and they do not have that movie, but would suggest a mix of similar movies, movies with the same actors or director. It's pretty clever, I just wish they were more explicit about it, as in showing the reasoning behind choosing a result.

pknerd 3y ago
Do not want to miss a chance to empty your pockets
- eatonphil 3y ago
  That doesn't make a ton of sense in the Netflix case since presumably it's actually more expensive for every additional movie you watch since your subscription price is fixed and each additional movie you watch costs bandwidth and compute?
  - pknerd 3y ago
    I will get bored if I am not exposed to what is available on the platform and will get unsubscribed. It's like social feed of a social media platform
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    On the other hand, people that don't watch any content are at the highest risk of cancelling their membership.
  - lukevp 3y ago
    Netflix wants you to justify the cost in your mind. The bandwidth is free. Netflix is such a high volume of internet traffic that the CDNs actually have edge content caches within the DCs of most major ISPs, so when you stream you’re actually streaming from a box at your ISP (or a cross connect to Netflix) and not costing Netflix any internet-facing bandwidth besides API calls. This setup is cheaper for everyone because the ISP doesn’t have to subscribe as large of an internet pipe because the high bandwidth streaming is siphoned off into private networking and never leaves the DC.

chefandy 3y ago

While the overall point holds true, some of the complaints don't make sense. Searching "rice" for example will probably get you parboiled white rice, instant red beans and rice, chicken and rice canned soup, and rice pudding— many of those facets make prefect sense. If you were searching for rice paper for crafting, or even "nuts," that "food" facet would be plenty useful. You can't look at one narrow usage path to judge an interface. You can only customize the interface so much for specific use cases before it becomes confusing as hell to use because it lacks consistency between tasks.

latch 3y ago
The complaint about "rice" is that the tagging is incomplete. "vegan" isn't a bad facet, but the count is wrong. When you select "vegan", most vegan products are removed. I don't see how filtering wrong data isn't a valid complaint. The problem is obviously that the data isn't tagged. But Costco is huge, profitable and doesn't have a huge inventory, so why can't they tag it? And if the tags are so incomplete, maybe it's better not to include them?
- pixl97 3y ago
  Tagging products sounds like something a LLM could do rather well with just a little human supervision.
  - binarymax 3y ago
    Have worked on this and it’s between 60 and 90% OK in my experiments. You run into lots of fun issues because people don’t write titles and descriptions for machines, they write them to appeal to human emotions to close a sale.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> Searching "rice" for example will probably get you parboiled white rice, instant red beans and rice, chicken and rice canned soup, and rice pudding— many of those facets make perfect sense. Well, no, if I ask for rice, the odds are overwhelming that I'm looking for rice, in which case chicken and rice canned soup is a totally inappropriate response. It would make as much sense as returning alcohol-free wine when asked for "alcohol".

4pkjai 3y ago

There’s a restaurant website in Hong Kong that lets you search by region. However it shows restaurants that paid to be featured at the top of the results. So the search results will often contain restaurants that are multiple hours away.

WaitWaitWha 3y ago
To some extent, this is consistent with Google's mobile Maps version when searching for anything. It returns "Relevance" by default, not by "Distance". I also noticed the same in several other website where "relevance" trumps my sort request (e.g., price, distance).
- core-utility 3y ago
  I hate this with a passion. I can be out somewhere, knowing that there's likely a McDonald's nearby. I zoom in to my location, type in McDonald's, and it zooms out to a 25 mile radius to show me every single McDonald's in the area including the one 0.1 miles away (that I then have to zoom all the way back into to get)
  - grogenaut 3y ago
    More favorite of mine is then it decides to fire up the first time user experience for some new features for you or shift into driving mode you thought you disabled. The you click what you think is the nearest MCD and it's the one close as the crow flies and on the other side of the freeway so 3 miles away. Search along route sometimes works better and sometimes also zooms out.
earthboundkid 3y ago
The last time I used Craigslist to apartment hunt, people spam the listings with the name of places 30 minutes away for some reason, as though I would just give up on living in the neighborhood I was searching for if I saw there was something somewhere completely different at a price that wasn't even that good.

gumby 3y ago

These are hilarious and infuriating but also, perhaps, correct? My gf (who used to work in the sector) says a lot of people like to sit in front of the TV and “watch what’s on” — one of the reasons broadcast TV still exists. You see this with sites like Netflix becoming decreasingly useful, urging you to simply click on something rather than consult your curated watch list. Some of them now hide your watch list! She suggests the same applies to shopping: some people just want to push the buy button, which is well known in brick and mortar retail, especially low margin ones like grocery shops: end caps, mid shelves and all sorts of other strategies are used to get you to either buy on impulse or buy the version they’d rather sell of what you have in mind. So for these sites the same applies: show a few options and the customer will simply pick one. Spam the tags, DWIM the customer’s ill-formed, uninformed, or simply unsatisfiable query, and see if the punter buys. For nerds like us this is a pessimization. But perhaps for the majority this works better.

pc86 3y ago
I've noticed a lot of streaming services will inconsistently show your watch list and/or show it in different locations on the home screen. I've long wondered if it's a mix of certain services just not being available or taking too long to respond when loading the lolomo (to use Netflix's term) and automated A/B tests trying to maximize some metric other than "starts watching something."
pixl97 3y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice Mentally when I'm at a store and I have 3 options to pick from I seemingly enjoy the process better then if I had 6 or 10. Eventually the picking itself becomes work. If it's a topic I enjoy like motherboards or RAM then all the choices are fine, I can spend hours on that, but if I'm picking tomato sauce for a quick and sloppy dish I don't want to spend the time selecting.
mmahemoff 3y ago
Yep. YouTube search has become smart about this, blending search with browsing. It typically gives you a handful of reasonably close matches, followed by a whole lot of wildly offtopic suggestions based on subscriptions, watch history, or who even knows. And this happens even when there would be more relevant results to show, i.e., there's not even a pretence of trying to give the N most relevant results. The game is to populate search with whatever users will click on.

flenserboy 3y ago

The point of website search (at least on commerce sites) is not to help the users find what they're searching for, but to put other, possibly related, products in front of their eyes. On most sites drilling down through limiters falls apart after about the third or fourth restriction is chosen, often because the sites seem designed to not give three or four clear choices (which is what the user wants to see), but ten or more vaguely related items (is this due to the fear that giving three or four results will imply that the site has a shortage of items to choose from?). Keep marketers & managers away from site design.

pixl97 3y ago
I may be wrong, but my guess is the site makes its money off those 'promoted' search terms of most popular/most profitable items and the work needed for the long tail doesn't seem worth it for most teams.
binarymax 3y ago
It’s both. What you’re referring to is “searchandizing”, and it’s a component of e-commerce for sure. But if you’re not also retrieving what the customer wants you’ll just piss them off and they’ll shop elsewhere.
cratermoon 3y ago
It's the digital equivalent of putting the cans of nacho cheese dip on a little rack in front of the shelves of tortilla chips.
- flenserboy 3y ago
  I can see that. It feels more like the car salesman who says, "Sure, you can look at the car you actually came here to see, but only after I show you three more we'd prefer to sell."
- travoc 3y ago
  It’s more like asking the clerk where to find the fruit salad and him giving you directions to strawberry ice cream.

nateburke 3y ago

Fixing this is the promise of enterprise deployments of LLMs, correct? That you can take the list of initial result texts from a shitty elasticsearch implementation, pass it into an LLM with a prompt "you are a user looking for <query>, please use common sense to comb through these results and find a few good ones" and get better intramural search quality. The only other enterprise application I am aware of is applying the homework cheating app to customer facing roles that require email/copy generation.

regularjack 3y ago
Implementing search correctly would solve the problem too, without requiring a square kilometer of GPUs.
- Spivak 3y ago
  Right but implementing search correctly often means humans combing through the data and applying common sense to tag the products with their actual facets. So really you're just choosing between a square kilometer of office space for cheap labor or GPUs.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    > you're just choosing between a square kilometer of office space for cheap labor or GPUs. No, with LLMs you're getting both, because a. LLMs need the human-curated data to ingest and b. after training the model is going to get RLHF. Also, a square kilometer of office space still uses much less electricity than a square kilometer of GPUs.
- pixl97 3y ago
  I'm guessing we're at or very near the point where LLMs could tag the data better and cheaper than humans.
- lukevp 3y ago
  If you have >100k items, “implementing search correctly” is an intractable problem if you don’t have a hundred person team of search relevance optimizers and taggers. Search is terrible until you gather tons of metadata about each item. Search is not nearly as simple as text matching within product titles. An LLM by comparison is peanuts. You could run it overnight and just have it build tags and metadata for all your items and it would probably be 75% accurate and a hell of a lot cheaper. Things can then be fine tuned by people later.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

Feels like there's a pretty widespread problem that goes something like this: * PO: We need search! * PM to architect: Google how to implement search! * Architect: googles "best search library 2023 java" Aha! Let's use Elasticsearch! * PM to Team: Alright, I need a search feature next sprint. Architect googled for 5 minutes and says we should use elasticsearch! * Team: Alright, integrating elasticsearch in a sprint should work. Bob, you work on loading the data, Eve, you work on rendering the search results. * Team (2-3 weeks later): Another successful value delivery! Alright, what's next PM? * PM: PO says we need a chat bot... If it's not obvious why this is a problem, getting search to work well requires a lot of tweaking and tuning. You can't just slap a search engine into a product and expect it to work well. It's hilariously incompatible with the assembly line style of work that many software outfits employ these days. It also requires deep understanding of what a search engine does and how its algorithms work.

kayodelycaon 3y ago
Intellectually, I knew this was common but I never stopped to consider how fortunate I am to work for a company who understands things like search are difficult. It helps we have two internal departments whose primary jobs are data management and analysis. (Real statistics, not “AI”.)
CharlieDigital 3y ago
There are actually plenty of non-ES products that are way easier to integrate and tune (and get better results with less effort). - Typesense (https://github.com/typesense/typesense https://github.com/typesense/typesense) - Algolia - Google Programmable Search Engine (https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/ https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/)
eusto 3y ago
It's more about what the company considers core business and what not. Most often they don't see the website as being important enough to the business so they don't invest in it. We have gotten used to almost flawless experiences from amazon shopping. Google search finds (or used to) results sometimes almost like magic, etc. The thing is, that's the core business. These companies invent new technologies and have huge teams because doing this is so hard. Now take a random supermarket chain. Their knowledge is about physical stores. Their core business has taught them where to open a store and how to arrange things in it so that they maximize their sales in that environment. It's very hard and it takes a very long time to shift to an online model. You have to find people with the right competencies and the right leadership to convince the company to do this and this is actually very hard to do. Look at the categories example. That, to me, screams backend database. The company has invested a lot of money into building business intelligence on top of their physical stores. That organization screams "perfectly curated data warehouse" and I imagine suggesting something like "we need to reorganize the way we store data" is going to be met with blank stares if not full on outrage.

rascul 3y ago

A little bit related, I wish web sites would stop hijacking the keys for my browser's search function.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andirk 3y ago
Almost every hijacking of keyboard and other default behaviors of our peripherals is lazy and arrogant UI. One exception is auto focusing on a search input element where that view is only used for that search box. Even then it's annoying because my browser back/forward via keyboard (cmd-left, cmd-right) gets hijacked by the focus.

renewiltord 3y ago

All this is unavoidable. But it's also temporary. This phase of search won't last since we're going to replace it with just SKU + inventory plus some fulltext search plus an LLM. An LLM browser assistant could probably solve this problem quite well. Inventory will never be well-tagged. The process change to ensure it would slow down procurement. Ideally, they'd expose an inventory XML list and we'd just use our LLM on it. The hard part is how to incentivize by permitting them control over advertising. An alternative is the browser LLM just searching across the page (Arc Browser can do this).

squarefoot 3y ago

One thing for sure is that shitty search algorithms in a page showing ads before search results, have the useful side effect of forcing users to refine search, exposing them to more ads before they find what they were searching for.

ano-ther 3y ago

Tagging ins tedious. Especially when it’s not you who searches but lots of other people, all with their specific ways of describing what they are looking for. And yes, the results are between amusing, annoying and infuriating. The “alcohol” example finding mostly comes from alcohol free products advertising this feature in their name - no need to name your regular beer or wine “with alcohol”, at least not in the product name.

nox100 3y ago
tagging doesn't work period because people will tag things to try to get their product in front of your eyes and add any tag they think is popular entirely unrelated to their "product".
- Solvency 3y ago
  So why not punish them and have bots regularly scan/assess tags for relevance.
pixl97 3y ago
Leaving myself a note here for when I'm back behind a computer. I'm wondering how well something like GPT-4 generates tags with a product description/product image. Be interesting to see its accuracy and comprehensiveness.

plz-remove-card 3y ago

On officedepot.com when searching for a produect I have found no way to filter by "in stock at my chosen store" you have to search, then click through each individual item. The one and only reason I am considering office depot as a place to spend my money is because they're local and I can go get whatever cable or thing I need, right now.

ruined 3y ago
analytics have confirmed that surfacing inventory status is bad for the customer because it reduces conversion
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ljdtt 3y ago
  Interesting. Do you have sources to read more about it?
- lukevp 3y ago
  Bad for the store you mean? Because the customer doesn’t convert (buy) something if it says “hurry only 1 left in stock” because everyone knows that store inventory is inaccurate and they ultimately don’t have 1 in stock, they have 0 in stock?
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    The way I interpret the comment, it says this: A. [explicit claim; humorous] Analytics confirm that, if you show people whether products are in stock locally, they won't buy those products on your website. B. [by implication] This is bad, because it "lowers" your sales. So you can't display this information. C. [by implication] The retailers are making a mistake - the reason people don't buy products on the website when availability information is displayed is that they go to the store and buy the product there. D. [summing up] If you measure something you don't care about, you will end up doing things that make you look like an idiot.

DonHopkins 3y ago

That's what you get when your AI Powered Search system is implemented by Web3 Experts who just pivoted to AI.

binarymax 3y ago

Love this article. Worked as a search relevance consultant for years and these are exactly the problems we work on. Most of the time fixing search is a thankless job. People expect it to work and when it does they take it for granted, but when it doesn’t it damages your reputation and brand. If you want to get started fixing website search relevance I recommend the books “Relevant Search” by Turnbull and Berryman, and “AI Powered Search” by Grainger, Turnbull, and yours truly. Both published by Manning.

bonecrusher2102 3y ago
Yep I work on Search as well -- both of these books are excellent. Website search is... hard. A lot of the faceting still needs to be done by hand. I think there's probably some opportunity for LLMs to make some sort of autotagging/categorization easier, but there will likely still need to be a human in the loop to verify.
lukevp 3y ago
Great recommendation on Relevant Search. I worked on an ecom site trying to improve search relevance for years, and it’s an incredibly difficult and challenging problem. Especially because it’s difficult to measure success, and execs would constantly come up with “hey why does this query not return exactly the results I expected” which led to a lot of resources spent optimizing a handful of queries based on executive input instead of based on query frequency and query result conversion metrics.
Solvency 3y ago
I'm not trying to fix search so what's the tldr on why it's so hard to do with such constrained databases? The Nintendo one seems insanely egregious. Is this not just a symptom of corporate laziness rather than search problem complexity?
- binarymax 3y ago
  The searchable content may be constrained, but the queries aren’t ;) Search is hard because you need to anticipate and model the language of all potential searchers and the content. There’s also lots of ambiguity because you’ll only get one or two keywords from the searcher without any other context, and you need to take into account trends and content quality and metadata. Also, in lots of cases search is bad because the product team either doesn’t know or doesn’t care.

Turing_Machine 3y ago

Years ago, I cobbled up a simple search engine for some FOSS web forum software, mainly for people who were running private instances behind login walls -- i.e., stuff that public search engines couldn't crawl. Someone complained that for public instances, Google worked better (this was back before Google started to suck). My response was that if I could write a better search engine than Google in my spare time, I'd be living a lifestyle considerably more luxurious than the one I actually had. :-)

jklinger410 3y ago

I have a hot take that Walmart is actually slowly going out of business. They don't do big box retailer stuff well (behind glass), they don't do local grocery well, and they don't even do discounted items well (5 below, Temu). Their stores are garbage and they are asleep at the wheel on their website. It is only a matter of time.

travoc 3y ago
All of these things have been true since the beginning of Walmart. Yet here they are, almost the largest retailer on earth.

andirk 3y ago

I'm currently working on a website search for e-commerce and wow there really is no end to what website search can and should do. The ANDs and the ORs are kind of confusing too. Is it AND between category selections, and OR within? And did anyone else notice the omission of that useless copyright line at the bottom of websites as if we know anything about copyright law?

jwr 3y ago

I can explain this. About 15 years ago or so, together with a friend, we started a company whose goal was to offer a working product search for E-commerce. Faceting was just one aspect of the problem, a much more pressing issue for non-English speaking countries is that you need a way to deal with declension and various misspellings (especially from people that do not enter accented characters). So we did. Solve the problems, that is. With a pretty good SaaS offering, reasonably easy to integrate into any E-commerce site. And then we discovered that you can have a great product, but selling it is an entirely different problem, and we were not able to solve that problem. It turned out we were competing with marketing budgets: a customer (E-commerce site) could either pay us and improve the customer experience significantly, or they could spend this money on customer acquisition and improve the bottom line right away. Guess which approach won. Another realization was that customer experience might actually not matter much. People are used to crappy websites and will jump through all sorts of hoops if the price is low. So many of our potential customers preferred to pay for customer leads (price comparison sites) and offer low prices, rather than improve customer experience, because customer loyalty isn't necessarily a thing these days. Also, if your main acquisition channel is price comparison sites (which is the case in many countries), you don't care about search: customers will land directly on product pages (where the price is right) and will endure the crappy search to add some stuff to their carts. We ended up with a bunch of happy customers who stayed with the product for years, but we stopped trying to sell it and moved to other things, it was just too hard to sell. In other words, addressing the OP's (excellent) article: your hurt feelings don't matter much, and nobody really cares, as long as the customer acquisition funnel works and there is a steady increase in the bottom line numbers.

jrm4 3y ago
Perfect. While I've never been as deep in the details, my perpetual answer here is: "You're so vain, I bet you think this search is about you?" I understand it because people are human, but I can't help but feel annoyance when people are like "the search engine isn't doing what I want!" It's not designed to DO THAT, it's designed to maximize it's own sales and we're pretty much at the point where we should try to stop pretending otherwise.
- 3y ago

AmazingTurtle 3y ago

To be fair, he searched for "laundry detergent" and sorted Name A-Z and was wondering why only 3M stuff appeared. Also I failed to comprehend this one > Of course the list of switch games isn't under Games > Nintendo Switch Games that would be silly. Well.. There is a list of games when you open Games > Nintento Switch Games. What is he complaining about?

xigoi 3y ago
> There is a list of games when you open Games > Nintento Switch Games. What is he complaining about? That the list doesn’t contain all Nintendo Switch games that the site offers and there doesn’t seem to be any clear reason why those particular 120 games were chosen.
latch 3y ago
If it's supposed to be sorted by name, why does "Ariel Oxy Bleach..." show up before "2-Fold Umbrella..." but "Ariel Antibac Jumbo" shows up after. This isn't just bad search, it's objectively wrong (and a lot more basic).

scotty79 3y ago

I would really love if there was some browser built-in skinnable system for lists that lets the user control ordering of the list and information visibility on the list, also filtering and grouping. There should be a movement for solutions that put power in the hands of the user.

croisillon 3y ago

I would try and install millions of apps on my iphone if the appstore was properly searchable, alas it’s not and i have like 10 apps installed

spcebar 3y ago

Faceting is a deceptively hard problem to solve because it requires understanding the features of the products within the categories of products within the ecosystem of products a seller is selling, and dividing them up based on how a customer is likely to be thinking about the products. If you're selling clothing, the customer is likely going to mean something different with the word "long" than they would mean if they were searching for foods. Within different categories of clothing the word "long" is going to mean different things.

DarkSucker 3y ago

Industry, please give us good search tools like those for researching articles: ("fog" near "coastline") AND ("lighthouse"). Or that offer regular expressions so I can search with precision. I got used to good search tools in grad school, and then came Google. And ever since I've not gotten better than a result salad. Sometimes a tasty salad, but still a salad. And, to be complete, firms like Nerac offer good search tools, but you need to work with someone who performs the search for you (last I used them).

welzel 3y ago

I have worked on very large e-Commerce sites and it seems there are 2 common issues: #1 a lot of teams are understaffed, overworked an not aligned, improving search is simply not a priority (at the same times, a lot of people are bored out of their mind, because of inefficient allocation of capacities). And of course, usable analytics data on search does not exist as it is hard to collect... #2 search might be actually ok, but the quality of the catalog data is a nightmare - and the catalog is maintenance by a tiny team that overworked and underpaid. To add injury to insult, there is also no clear accountability established and 5 departments and a couple of vendors play the "not my problem" game. Sometimes 10-30% of the catalog is renewed every year and people gave up a long time ago to report problems.