4 ms·

I do not get his criticism. If I search Amazon for "pink impact resistant iphone 5 cover", most of the results should qualify for "a highly protective yet girli

by qznc 14y ago

I do not get his criticism. If I search Amazon for "pink impact resistant iphone 5 cover", most of the results should qualify for "a highly protective yet girlish phone case as a gift for her daughter". What should this mother have done? How does a "competent searcher" approach this? The most important search skill for Google is "The first results are ads! Look for the slightly yellow background!"

hexagonc 14y ago
I agree. The only mistake the user made with the search query: "pink impact resistant iphone 5 cover", is failing to realize that she probably only needed to search for "impact resistant iphone 5 cover". Products on this page may already have an option to choose pink. The fact that Amazon shows a lot of related products on a page is basically a form of category search, anyway.
bhaak 14y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon tweaked their search engine after the referenced study came out. Maybe even specifically for that word combination. This happens a lot. When popular magazines do search tests with a range of apps and one of the result is "$foo didn't find our $absurd_word_that_we_use_for_testing" you can be sure that it will find it soon afterwards so they won't look bad again in later tests.
russelluresti 14y ago
His point is that there is a gap between actual search functionality and people's understanding of it. Users expect to be able to type in something similar to how they would describe a product to a store clerk (e.g. "I need a pink, impact resistant iphone 5 cover."). But search fields don't understand language patterns or sentence meaning. Search fields work off key words, ranked by priority. These key words match item titles, descriptions, tags, categories, etc. It also isn't capable of doing word substitution, so it may not know you meant "case" instead of "cover". So if "cover" doesn't appear in the title or description, the search won't rank it that highly (if it's a "case"). In this case, putting the query as something like "iPhone 5 case pink" would have probably returned results that were more aligned with what the user was looking for, but most people aren't going to think that way. When you understand how a search input actually works - text input, query statements, database structures, ranking algorithms, etc. - you think about searches in a completely different way. Most people don't understand these things, so they think about searches in terms of what they would ask an actual person for.

by qznc 14y ago

hexagonc 14y ago

I agree. The only mistake the user made with the search query: "pink impact resistant iphone 5 cover", is failing to realize that she probably only needed to search for "impact resistant iphone 5 cover". Products on this page may already have an option to choose pink. The fact that Amazon shows a lot of related products on a page is basically a form of category search, anyway.

bhaak 14y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon tweaked their search engine after the referenced study came out. Maybe even specifically for that word combination. This happens a lot. When popular magazines do search tests with a range of apps and one of the result is "$foo didn't find our $absurd_word_that_we_use_for_testing" you can be sure that it will find it soon afterwards so they won't look bad again in later tests.

russelluresti 14y ago

His point is that there is a gap between actual search functionality and people's understanding of it. Users expect to be able to type in something similar to how they would describe a product to a store clerk (e.g. "I need a pink, impact resistant iphone 5 cover."). But search fields don't understand language patterns or sentence meaning. Search fields work off key words, ranked by priority. These key words match item titles, descriptions, tags, categories, etc. It also isn't capable of doing word substitution, so it may not know you meant "case" instead of "cover". So if "cover" doesn't appear in the title or description, the search won't rank it that highly (if it's a "case"). In this case, putting the query as something like "iPhone 5 case pink" would have probably returned results that were more aligned with what the user was looking for, but most people aren't going to think that way. When you understand how a search input actually works - text input, query statements, database structures, ranking algorithms, etc. - you think about searches in a completely different way. Most people don't understand these things, so they think about searches in terms of what they would ask an actual person for.