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.
Not disagreeing, but this example seems like a data/tagging problem which is probably some other department.
Website search hurts my feelings
11–20 of 201 posts
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#12Vaguely 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…
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.Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#13eBay 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.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#14If 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.
Not disagreeing, but this example seems like a data/tagging problem which is probably some other department.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#15I 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?
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.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#16Vaguely 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…
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.
You're right though, this is incredibly dumb design.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#17Vaguely 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…
Just try to get to display settings on windows these days through the start menu.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#18The 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.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#19Vaguely 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…
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.
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.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#20I 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?
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 s…