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

Website search hurts my feelings

openmymind.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 201 posts

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#41

Post by pc86 »

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.

And in any sane company, the minute a product person says "oh this egregious error is a problem for some other department" they'd be fired immediately, so it still sounds like a useful exercise.

I'll be the first admit I don't have a ton of respect for the "product owner" role which has morphed largely into Tom Smykowski from Office Space[0] but the places I've seen them be actually effective and net positives for an organization are where they have the reach and authority to demand things like this be fixed, regardless of what department is "in charge." IMO a product owner who doesn't do this is refusing to do one of the few useful product owner roles.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/characters/nm0726223

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#42

Post by gumby »

These are hilarious and infuriating but also, perhaps, correct?

My gf (who used to work in the sector) says a lot of people like to sit in front of the TV and “watch what’s on” — one of the reasons broadcast TV still exists.

You see this with sites like Netflix becoming decreasingly useful, urging you to simply click on something rather than consult your curated watch list. Some of them now hide your watch list!

She suggests the same applies to shopping: some people just want to push the buy button, which is well known in brick and mortar retail, especially low margin ones like grocery shops: end caps, mid shelves and all sorts of other strategies are used to get you to either buy on impulse or buy the version they’d rather sell of what you have in mind.

So for these sites the same applies: show a few options and the customer will simply pick one. Spam the tags, DWIM the customer’s ill-formed, uninformed, or simply unsatisfiable query, and see if the punter buys.

For nerds like us this is a pessimization. But perhaps for the majority this works better.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#43

Post by prepend »

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.

I’ve had good results with brute forcing tagging even when it’s not my job.

If I use my product and hate it, I make it better. Knowing they some other department sucks for years is no good.

I think all this boils down to companies not really giving a flip.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#44

Post by flenserboy »

The point of website search (at least on commerce sites) is not to help the users find what they're searching for, but to put other, possibly related, products in front of their eyes. On most sites drilling down through limiters falls apart after about the third or fourth restriction is chosen, often because the sites seem designed to not give three or four clear choices (which is what the user wants to see), but ten or more vaguely related items (is this due to the fear that giving three or four results will imply that the site has a shortage of items to choose from?). Keep marketers & managers away from site design.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#45

Post by nateburke »

Fixing this is the promise of enterprise deployments of LLMs, correct? That you can take the list of initial result texts from a shitty elasticsearch implementation, pass it into an LLM with a prompt "you are a user looking for , please use common sense to comb through these results and find a few good ones" and get better intramural search quality.

The only other enterprise application I am aware of is applying the homework cheating app to customer facing roles that require email/copy generation.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#46

Post by marginalia_nu »

Feels like there's a pretty widespread problem that goes something like this:

* PO: We need search!

* PM to architect: Google how to implement search!

* Architect: googles "best search library 2023 java" Aha! Let's use Elasticsearch!

* PM to Team: Alright, I need a search feature next sprint. Architect googled for 5 minutes and says we should use elasticsearch!

* Team: Alright, integrating elasticsearch in a sprint should work. Bob, you work on loading the data, Eve, you work on rendering the search results.

* Team (2-3 weeks later): Another successful value delivery! Alright, what's next PM?

* PM: PO says we need a chat bot...

If it's not obvious why this is a problem, getting search to work well requires a lot of tweaking and tuning. You can't just slap a search engine into a product and expect it to work well. It's hilariously incompatible with the assembly line style of work that many software outfits employ these days. It also requires deep understanding of what a search engine does and how its algorithms work.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#47

Post by latch »

chefandy wrote: post #34

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 j…

The complaint about "rice" is that the tagging is incomplete. "vegan" isn't a bad facet, but the count is wrong. When you select "vegan", most vegan products are removed. I don't see how filtering wrong data isn't a valid complaint.

The problem is obviously that the data isn't tagged. But Costco is huge, profitable and doesn't have a huge inventory, so why can't they tag it? And if the tags are so incomplete, maybe it's better not to include them?

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#48

Post by vasco »

karaterobot wrote: post #23
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.

I've worked on products with ALL of these exact issues. The answer is usually that the data isn't annotated well enough, or that there are not enough developer resources to make special case fixes for things 99% of people don't notice or care about (and so are not losing us money, they just annoy us). At the companies I worked for, fixing these problems was not within the remit of the head of product, they were cross…

The responsibility of a product person is that the product works well. This includes working with design and engineering partners as well as any data annotation departments. If the search experience is shit and the head of product doesn't think it's up to them, they aren't being responsible for the product.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#49

Post by whstl »

karaterobot wrote: post #23
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.

I've worked on products with ALL of these exact issues. The answer is usually that the data isn't annotated well enough, or that there are not enough developer resources to make special case fixes for things 99% of people don't notice or care about (and so are not losing us money, they just annoy us). At the companies I worked for, fixing these problems was not within the remit of the head of product, they were cross…

The reason the responsibility for this is on heads of products is not because they're directly responsible for annotating, it's because they're responsible for knowing what can and will get annotated so the feature they asked for actually works.

The work of product person shouldn't stop at the idea phase.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#50

Post by pknerd »

eatonphil wrote: post #40
pknerd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I will get bored if I am not exposed to what is available on the platform and will get unsubscribed. It's like social feed of a social media platform
Post reply on HN