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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 l

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.
gniv 3y ago
> I honestly don't understand how some websites have such awful search Good website search is hard. Funnily in some respects it's harder than web search, since there are no popularity signals a la pagerank. (There could be such signals, but you have to work hard to create them.)

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.

gniv 3y ago

> I honestly don't understand how some websites have such awful search Good website search is hard. Funnily in some respects it's harder than web search, since there are no popularity signals a la pagerank. (There could be such signals, but you have to work hard to create them.)