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Website search hurts my feelings

openmymind.net

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Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#131

Post by Turing_Machine »

Years ago, I cobbled up a simple search engine for some FOSS web forum software, mainly for people who were running private instances behind login walls -- i.e., stuff that public search engines couldn't crawl.

Someone complained that for public instances, Google worked better (this was back before Google started to suck).

My response was that if I could write a better search engine than Google in my spare time, I'd be living a lifestyle considerably more luxurious than the one I actually had. :-)

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#132

Post by cratermoon »

Spivak wrote: post #96
regularjack wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you're just choosing between a square kilometer of office space for cheap labor or GPUs.

No, with LLMs you're getting both, because a. LLMs need the human-curated data to ingest and b. after training the model is going to get RLHF.

Also, a square kilometer of office space still uses much less electricity than a square kilometer of GPUs.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#133

Post by wharvle »

billyjmc wrote: post #101
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.

Not quite the same, but iOS gives me trouble with its word suggestions. Usually, it’s contractions that make me curse. ‘It’ suggests It, It’s, and Its. ‘Its’ suggests Its and Itself. Given that the apostrophe requires accessing a different keyboard overlay, and that only two suggestions are presented (leaving one suggestion slot empty), why not just include the contraction “It’s” in the suggestions?

A few versions back, iOS started sometimes not finding my searches in settings at all.

Like I’ll search the full word “passwords”, pausing after each letter, and not get the entry titled “passwords” in my results the whole time. Back out, do it again, this time it’s there by the time I type “pas”.

This used to work perfectly, but has been inconsistently broken for years now. Most recent time I saw it was a week or two ago, so it’s still happening. What’s most baffling to me is that a search over such a relatively static dataset (app settings are in there, but those don’t get added or modified often) can be non-deterministic.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#134

Post by ruined »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #125
lukevp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The way I interpret the comment, it says this: A. [explicit claim; humorous] Analytics confirm that, if you show people whether products are in stock locally, they won't buy those products on your website. B. [by implication] This is bad, because it "lowers" your sales. So you can't display this information. C. [by implication] The retailers are making a mistake - the reason people don't buy products on the website w…

close enough

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#135

Post by grogenaut »

core-utility wrote: post #78
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

More favorite of mine is then it decides to fire up the first time user experience for some new features for you or shift into driving mode you thought you disabled. The you click what you think is the nearest MCD and it's the one close as the crow flies and on the other side of the freeway so 3 miles away.

Search along route sometimes works better and sometimes also zooms out.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#136

Post by chefandy »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #54
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…

> 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…

Assuming these sorts of things about your users' intent causes big usability problems. Trying to predict how users will use search usually ends up more frustrating than not for many people. Most people who use these tools don't have a working mental model of how search engines work, so they can't troubleshoot easily if your expectations and theirs don't line up. This is exactly the sort of "smart" feature that developers crow about all the time. Unless you have some way of predicting how individual people will use search boxes then you're much better off with something more general.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#137

Post by underlipton »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #125
lukevp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The way I interpret the comment, it says this: A. [explicit claim; humorous] Analytics confirm that, if you show people whether products are in stock locally, they won't buy those products on your website. B. [by implication] This is bad, because it "lowers" your sales. So you can't display this information. C. [by implication] The retailers are making a mistake - the reason people don't buy products on the website w…

That's not a good explanation. Either GGP was being sarcastic or is corpo-brained. GP was confused because, unfortunately, both are equally likely these days.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#138

Post by flenserboy »

cratermoon wrote: post #130
flenserboy wrote: post #44

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…

It's the digital equivalent of putting the cans of nacho cheese dip on a little rack in front of the shelves of tortilla chips.

I can see that. It feels more like the car salesman who says, "Sure, you can look at the car you actually came here to see, but only after I show you three more we'd prefer to sell."

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#139

Post by pc86 »

cratermoon wrote: post #129
pc86 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This is literally the entire point of search - show what you're searching for if it exists, and show related things after it. That might make sense in an abstract way, but no, that's not what people expect. If I'm searching for something at Netflix, I don't want the answer to "does it exist?", I want the answer to "do you have available for viewing?".

So you search for The Office on Netflix which is only available on Peacock as far as I know. How is a screen that says "We don't have The Office, sorry!" with no other information at all preferable to this? https://i.imgur.com/W6a1hDk.png

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#140

Post by jklinger410 »

I have a hot take that Walmart is actually slowly going out of business.

They don't do big box retailer stuff well (behind glass), they don't do local grocery well, and they don't even do discounted items well (5 below, Temu).

Their stores are garbage and they are asleep at the wheel on their website.

It is only a matter of time.

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