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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. Fa
by 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 agoPerfect. 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.
- mvdtnz 3y agoIt's not vanity to complain that a faceted search tool is surfacing completely useless facets populated by obviously-wrong data and actively lying to the user about the number of results in each facet. Or returning completely unrelated products like an umbrella in a search for laundry detergent in the top 3 results. Users should expect better. People with your attitude are not helping.
- jrm4 3y agoYeah, I think my downvotes are not getting my exact intent here; I think what I'm saying or trying to express is the extent to which there's a lack of savviness by everyone about the workings of this particular product? I guess I'm baffled as to how search has stayed so garbage for so long and why this hasn't been more disrupted yet. We know (or should know) the problem and we have things that look a lot like the solution? Wikipedia has lessons, always adding "reddit" to your searches has lessons, now ChatGPT has lessons. I guess, to me, this type of complaining is just kind of, yeah duh. Now what?
- jwr 3y ago> returning completely unrelated products like an umbrella in a search for laundry detergent in the top 3 results Actually… Consider this: the goal for the E-commerce site is to make more money. If showing unrelated products in search results brings in more revenue than showing the products the customer actually searched for — then that's what will be done. This is not theoretical, I actually know of this being done on purpose.
- scotty79 3y agoYou should have pivoted and become price comparison site with good product search.
- tempestn 3y agoComparison sites are predominantly not about good search either, but rather affiliate relationships.
- slig 3y agoAnd borderline SERP spam tactics to get organic visitors.
- scotty79 3y agoSo the conclusion must be there's exactly zero value in good search. No wonder google gets worse and worse.
- realusername 3y agoThat's the same thing for Google indeed, they are getting paid by the search ads so they don't care of the quality of what's below those. As long as the market share is that high, there's no reason to improve anything.
- refulgentis 3y agoThis reply is to a comment gently indicating we've arrived at an obviously wrong conclusion. Gliding past that with "Google [doesn't] care [about] search quality" doesn't add much.
- realusername 3y agoWell, the example given shows that the conclusion wasn't necessarily wrong because Google has the same issue.
- 3y ago
- esafak 3y agoI think whether or not it matters is contextual. If I am trying to get work done, or trying to buy something on your site I very much care if search works. UX is a feature. You can acquire customers with lower prices, but can you keep them with a bad UX?
- kamikaz1k 3y agoThe answer is clearly yes… It’s a feature but not the only feature. Ppl complain about Google search (arguably their only feature) on HN everyday, but they’re still essentially a monopoly.
- esafak 3y agoTheir monopoly status is why they can get away with it; don't copy them. And don't forget that their early attention to UX, with a spartan UI, and famously fast and good response is what made them succeed in the first place. Users are deciding that chatGPT offers a better search UX in some cases and abandoning Google. So the answer is "No, unless you are a monopoly, and even then don't push your luck."
- thayne 3y ago> because customer loyalty isn't necessarily a thing these days. Probably because so many companies have burned that loyalty for short term gains. It isn't worth being loyal to a company if at any time they can decide to throw those loyal customers under a bus to make a quick buck.