Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sweet! Can Netflix search by age rating yet?
Start typing something like age:8 and you'll get a relevant category suggestion.
age:35
Website search hurts my feelings
91–100 of 201 posts
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#92While 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…
> 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 perfect sense. Well, no, if I ask for rice, the odds are overwhelming that I'm looking for rice, in which case chicken and rice canned soup is a totally inappropriate response. It would make as much sense as returning alcohol-free wine when as…
But chicken and rice canned soup contains rice and the word is part of its logical title.
You should be able to unearth the soup with a partial match. What makes the alcohol/alcohol-free problem is that alcohol free is one token that can't be subdivided.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#93On officedepot.com when searching for a produect I have found no way to filter by "in stock at my chosen store" you have to search, then click through each individual item.
The one and only reason I am considering office depot as a place to spend my money is because they're local and I can go get whatever cable or thing I need, right now.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#94While 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 i…
Tagging products sounds like something a LLM could do rather well with just a little human supervision.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
The firefox awesomebar and the history search are atrocious. Sometimes even if I visited the site in the last 5 minutes there will be no autocomplete available.
Make sure to change omnibar settings to prefer history over search.
Wow. That helped quite a bit, thank you.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#96Fixing 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…
Implementing search correctly would solve the problem too, without requiring a square kilometer of GPUs.
Right but implementing search correctly often means humans combing through the data and applying common sense to tag the products with their actual facets. So really you're just choosing between a square kilometer of office space for cheap labor or GPUs.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#97The 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…
I may be wrong, but my guess is the site makes its money off those 'promoted' search terms of most popular/most profitable items and the work needed for the long tail doesn't seem worth it for most teams.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The problem is that the sort of stuff you need to tune a search engine to actually perform well doesn't look like work. It simply can't be broken down into deliveries that provide incremental business value, and throughout the entire process it's going to look like a bunch of fiddling with numbers with nothing to show for it.
Does any product feature that requires care and maintenance easily fit the model of delivering incremental value?
But for a search engine, showing incremental value should be easy if you have a real product reason to do it. If you expect search to help people find content, then you look at statistics on engagement --- in aggregate did people use search, does it look like they found what they wanted, did they return and use search again. In specific, which queries seem popular and provide good results, which queries seem popular and don't provide good results. You provide incremental value by moving queries from the second to the first category, where possible. If you can kind of classify some of the less popular queries, there's value in improving results for those too, but classification is also hard.
Sometimes the numbers are easy... I participated in an application of search where a support request hit the FAQ before submission --- if search works, there should be fewer tickets and especially fewer tickets where the user can easily solve their own problem. Search in a shopping context should lead to more sales. Etc.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#99Fixing 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…
Implementing search correctly would solve the problem too, without requiring a square kilometer of GPUs.
I'm guessing we're at or very near the point where LLMs could tag the data better and cheaper than humans.
Re: Website search hurts my feelings
#100These 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…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice
Mentally when I'm at a store and I have 3 options to pick from I seemingly enjoy the process better then if I had 6 or 10. Eventually the picking itself becomes work. If it's a topic I enjoy like motherboards or RAM then all the choices are fine, I can spend hours on that, but if I'm picking tomato sauce for a quick and sloppy dish I don't want to spend the time selecting.