Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Amazon Search on Steroids

jeviz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: Show HN: Amazon Search on Steroids

#21

Post by ceyhunkazel »

vblord wrote: post #12

I agree that the interface is way overwhelming. It's very hard to see what the text boxes are for because the labels are positioned so funny. I was also not expecting it to open a new window to Amazon. I thought the results would stay on your site (like on CCC). Also, how do you pronounce the name of the site anyways? From a functionality standpoint, I think this works great. I wish amazon would let me search by all…

Thank you for the feedback. I will add smile url option. Jeviz is pronounced like first parth of these words ge-neral and vis-io

Re: Show HN: Amazon Search on Steroids

#22

Post by ceyhunkazel »

inertial wrote: post #20

Say I want to search a shirt of specific brands only e.g. "Calvin Klein" and "Versace". If I misspell the name, Amazon won't complain, rather it'll show the incorrect brand name in the left pane. Would it be easy to add auto-suggest for brands so that I get the name right.

Auto complete these features are not provided by Amazon but I really thinking of implement it myself. Thank you for the feedback!

Re: Show HN: Amazon Search on Steroids

#24

Post by notyourwork »

moepstar wrote: post #10

Nice job :) Sad though, once one considers what Amazon has begun as: a search engine... And yes, somehow and for some reason most ecommerce sites are not good at filtering their data on more criteria in categories...

Amazon has hundreds of millions of items, search at that scale is not as easy as it is for a few thousand books. E-commerce search is not the same as google search. Relevance by words and associations like google creates is much different than how people search when shopping/exploring.

If you have a better way to do it, Amazon is hiring and I am sure they would love to hear your ideas.

Re: Show HN: Amazon Search on Steroids

#28

Post by daveguy »

I always thought it would be nice to sort by stars x reviewers or stars x log(reviews) -- something like that. Something that better balances rating and popularity. One of the most annoying things in amazon search by rating is scrolling through screens and screens of products with one user giving a product 5 stars.

Re: Show HN: Amazon Search on Steroids

#29

Post by karambahh »

notyourwork wrote: post #24
moepstar wrote: post #10

Nice job :) Sad though, once one considers what Amazon has begun as: a search engine... And yes, somehow and for some reason most ecommerce sites are not good at filtering their data on more criteria in categories...

Amazon has hundreds of millions of items, search at that scale is not as easy as it is for a few thousand books. E-commerce search is not the same as google search. Relevance by words and associations like google creates is much different than how people search when shopping/exploring. If you have a better way to do it, Amazon is hiring and I am sure they would love to hear your ideas.

I am not so sure they really care about changing their search.

They only recently started to change their recommendation stack, after years of using outdated technologies. I think it is somewhat similar with search.

It's not so much that "it's complicated at their scale" as "It works somewhat okay, which translates into X hundreds of millions of $, so don't touch it".

I know they could (and they most probably do) run A/B tests, but the thing is, how do you run MVT tests on such a large infrastructure, with such a varied catalog, etc...it all gets very complicated at their scale, just from an org perspective.

Many "power users" complain about the state of Amazon search, but I doubt the average joe really cares about that.

A more recent (and with a much smaller catalog) player, zalando (rocket internet) has a modular org and a modular approach to their stacks and they, apparently, change or update their tools much more often than Amazon.

I am pretty sure zalando being more "agile" come from their much smaller size (both in inventory, turnover and org).

Large organisations have a harder time moving than smaller ones, after all...

Post reply on HN