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Website search hurts my feelings

openmymind.net

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Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#111

Post by javari »

plz-remove-card wrote: post #93

On 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.

I did just check this, and I found it fairly easy to filter by in-stock at my chosen store. Did you set a preferred store then filter by the "store pickup" option? Doing that, I returned results for chair mats with the option to check other local stores.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#112

Post by binarymax »

Love this article. Worked as a search relevance consultant for years and these are exactly the problems we work on. Most of the time fixing search is a thankless job. People expect it to work and when it does they take it for granted, but when it doesn’t it damages your reputation and brand.

If you want to get started fixing website search relevance I recommend the books “Relevant Search” by Turnbull and Berryman, and “AI Powered Search” by Grainger, Turnbull, and yours truly. Both published by Manning.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#113

Post by binarymax »

pixl97 wrote: post #94
latch wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have worked on this and it’s between 60 and 90% OK in my experiments. You run into lots of fun issues because people don’t write titles and descriptions for machines, they write them to appeal to human emotions to close a sale.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#114

Post by ljdtt »

ruined wrote: post #106
plz-remove-card wrote: post #93

On 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.

analytics have confirmed that surfacing inventory status is bad for the customer because it reduces conversion

Interesting. Do you have sources to read more about it?

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#115

Post by pixl97 »

toast0 wrote: post #98
marginalia_nu wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I think you may miss how many technology projects fail in companies. A company may have no internal knowledge or skill to make search better, so they get an outside contracting group that produces a shitty product that doesn't improve sales and costs an extraordinary amount for the lack of results.

Quite often the company won't make any more in those long tail sales, but instead better placement of the products they buy in mass.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#116

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

gniv wrote: post #69
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #33

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.

>a relevant category suggestion

I had waited so long for rating filters, my kids became adults.

However, I was wondering what Netflix got after 17 years of development at $215k-$700k per dev - and now I know.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#117

Post by lukevp »

ruined wrote: post #106
plz-remove-card wrote: post #93

On 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.

analytics have confirmed that surfacing inventory status is bad for the customer because it reduces conversion

Bad for the store you mean? Because the customer doesn’t convert (buy) something if it says “hurry only 1 left in stock” because everyone knows that store inventory is inaccurate and they ultimately don’t have 1 in stock, they have 0 in stock?

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#118

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.

I had migrated to watching Netflix content on pirate sites for the better experience and stayed for the better experience.

> 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.

An excellent, early pirate feature. Good on Netflix for adopting it.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#119

Post by bonecrusher2102 »

binarymax wrote: post #112

Love this article. Worked as a search relevance consultant for years and these are exactly the problems we work on. Most of the time fixing search is a thankless job. People expect it to work and when it does they take it for granted, but when it doesn’t it damages your reputation and brand. If you want to get started fixing website search relevance I recommend the books “Relevant Search” by Turnbull and Berryman, an…

Yep I work on Search as well -- both of these books are excellent.

Website search is... hard. A lot of the faceting still needs to be done by hand. I think there's probably some opportunity for LLMs to make some sort of autotagging/categorization easier, but there will likely still need to be a human in the loop to verify.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#120

Post by mmahemoff »

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…

Yep. YouTube search has become smart about this, blending search with browsing. It typically gives you a handful of reasonably close matches, followed by a whole lot of wildly offtopic suggestions based on subscriptions, watch history, or who even knows. And this happens even when there would be more relevant results to show, i.e., there's not even a pretence of trying to give the N most relevant results. The game is to populate search with whatever users will click on.
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