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Website search hurts my feelings

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Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#71

Post by pc86 »

leephillips wrote: post #56
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.

I don’t understand. How is it useful for Netflix to show me movies that they don’t have? And how hard is it to implement search over their catalog when they only seem to have about 100 movies?

Just because they don't have the rights to stream The Office doesn't mean they don't know what shows and movies they have are enjoyed by people who also enjoy The Office. This is literally the entire point of search - show what you're searching for if it exists, and show related things after it.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#72

Post by User23 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #46

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 s…

A big reason why is Search today is an AI Librarian. That AI may be more or less smart, but at the end of the result that's what people mean when they say Search. They certainly do not mean a robust query language that will allow them to iteratively refine down a subset of matching documents in a corpus until the desired document is found.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#73

Post by WaitWaitWha »

4pkjai wrote: post #35

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.

To some extent, this is consistent with Google's mobile Maps version when searching for anything. It returns "Relevance" by default, not by "Distance".

I also noticed the same in several other website where "relevance" trumps my sort request (e.g., price, distance).

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#74

Post by Podgajski »

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…

Amazon is beyond frustrating. The amount of totally unrelated results to a search is so frustrating. And I mean totally unrelated.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#75

Post by pc86 »

gumby wrote: post #42

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…

I've noticed a lot of streaming services will inconsistently show your watch list and/or show it in different locations on the home screen. I've long wondered if it's a mix of certain services just not being available or taking too long to respond when loading the lolomo (to use Netflix's term) and automated A/B tests trying to maximize some metric other than "starts watching something."

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#76

Post by nonbirithm »

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…

It's been that way for years: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20351

I lost hope it and other issues would be fixed and moved to Chromium on Android.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#77

Post by core-utility »

eusto wrote: post #65
marginalia_nu wrote: post #46

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 s…

It's more about what the company considers core business and what not. Most often they don't see the website as being important enough to the business so they don't invest in it. We have gotten used to almost flawless experiences from amazon shopping. Google search finds (or used to) results sometimes almost like magic, etc. The thing is, that's the core business. These companies invent new technologies and have huge…

> almost flawless experiences from amazon shopping

In my opinion its too fuzzy, which is usually the opposite problem I have with website searches (e.g. searching a news site for keywords of an article I know exits, but it's taking me too literally)

If I search for "iPhone 14 Pro case", I don't want to see cases for iPhone 15 __, or non-pro models. I've (to my own fault) bought way too many of the wrong product because I search for a specific model and don't read the title before ordering, only to realize that Amazon didn't give me exactly what I typed in.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#78

Post by core-utility »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #73
4pkjai wrote: post #35

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.

To some extent, this is consistent with Google's mobile Maps version when searching for anything. It returns "Relevance" by default, not by "Distance". I also noticed the same in several other website where "relevance" trumps my sort request (e.g., price, distance).

I hate this with a passion. I can be out somewhere, knowing that there's likely a McDonald's nearby. I zoom in to my location, type in McDonald's, and it zooms out to a 25 mile radius to show me every single McDonald's in the area including the one 0.1 miles away (that I then have to zoom all the way back into to get)

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#79

Post by robertlagrant »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #46

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 s…

I think if you remove the cariacature that approach isn't terrible, assuming there's no more suitable technology. Why not have a basic search and iterate, including iterating the technology choice. You can hide it behind a feature flag if you don't think it's ready.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#80

Post by marcinzm »

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.

In my experience it's not just about using a product but understanding how a product functions under the hood. Yelling "fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it" in a loop at random teams tends to not actually get things fixed. Instead you'll get a lot of blame shifting, a lot of random "projects" to improve things and in the end no improvement (or often an even worse experience). In other words you'll get corporate politics. Very few executives understand a modern search stack in anything resembling a useful level of detail much less how their teams map to it.
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