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Website search hurts my feelings

openmymind.net

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Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#31

Post by fuzzbazz »

malfist wrote: post #17
okasaki wrote: post #9

Vaguely 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…

The worst offender of this practice has to be the windows start menu. Even when you fully type the executable name, it can show up below the fold under unrelated results. Just try to get to display settings on windows these days through the start menu.

After disabling the web search capability it seems to work properly, for me.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#32

Post by pimlottc »

dbetteridge wrote: post #6

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?

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.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#33

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

gniv wrote: post #26

On the other end of the spectrum, I've been impressed by Netflix search. I would search a name and they do not have that movie, but would suggest a mix of similar movies, movies with the same actors or director. It's pretty clever, I just wish they were more explicit about it, as in showing the reasoning behind choosing a result.

Sweet! Can Netflix search by age rating yet?

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#34

Post by chefandy »

While the overall point holds true, some of the complaints don't make sense. Searching "rice" for example will probably get you parboiled white rice, instant red beans and rice, chicken and rice canned soup, and rice pudding— many of those facets make prefect sense. If you were searching for rice paper for crafting, or even "nuts," that "food" facet would be plenty useful.

You can't look at one narrow usage path to judge an interface. You can only customize the interface so much for specific use cases before it becomes confusing as hell to use because it lacks consistency between tasks.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#35

Post by 4pkjai »

There’s a restaurant website in Hong Kong that lets you search by region.

However it shows restaurants that paid to be featured at the top of the results.

So the search results will often contain restaurants that are multiple hours away.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#36

Post by basil-rash »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #28
bee_rider wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there is some weighting based on how often you go to a certain result after typing a certain number of letters. For example, since I was just doing Advent of Code and going to related sites: a, ad, adv -> first result is adventofcode.com/2023 adve -> first result is adventofcode.com/2023/day/1 [honestly, this one baffles me, but I guess I went back to day 1 at some point after typing `adve`] adven, advent, ad…

I’d much prefer they took VS Code’s fuzzy non contiguous substring searching algorithm. ra would be reddit.com/r/adventifcode, same for redadv, or r/a, etc. and things like a, ad, a3, etc. would be adventofcode.com/2023

And if they included the full URL, sheesh… you could effortlessly query against search params, path segments, fragments, and origins all in one intuitive interface.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#37

Post by marginalia_nu »

malfist wrote: post #14
satyrnein wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing, but this example seems like a data/tagging problem which is probably some other department.

Data tagging makes Walmart throw a huge banner ad for pancakes into your search for lentils?

Lentil pancakes are actually a thing to be fair.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#38

Post by ellisv »

satyrnein wrote: post #7
vasco wrote: post #3

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.

Ideally, manufacturers and sellers would provide more, accurate information about products -- but I generally like how Google solved this within Google Maps via crowdsourcing by prompting users to answer questions about places (e.g. does this place have a wheelchair ramp?). I wish there was a better process to collect and store product information so it could be more easily shared.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#39

Post by kaibee »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #15
dbetteridge wrote: post #6

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?

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…

Newegg had (has? haven't used in a while) very good search categories for PC hardware.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#40

Post by eatonphil »

pknerd wrote: post #30
gniv wrote: post #26

On the other end of the spectrum, I've been impressed by Netflix search. I would search a name and they do not have that movie, but would suggest a mix of similar movies, movies with the same actors or director. It's pretty clever, I just wish they were more explicit about it, as in showing the reasoning behind choosing a result.

Do not want to miss a chance to empty your pockets

That doesn't make a ton of sense in the Netflix case since presumably it's actually more expensive for every additional movie you watch since your subscription price is fixed and each additional movie you watch costs bandwidth and compute?
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