Website search hurts my feelings

I'm not trying to fix search so what's the tldr on why it's so hard to do with such constrained databases? The Nintendo one seems insanely egregious. Is this not just a symptom of corporate laziness rather than search problem complexity?

Just watched Trading Places again on Christmas Eve. While I wouldn't say it's aged terribly, I will say this: nobody does blackface like Dan Akroyd.

Many if not most ecom sites will be using a vendor for search (e.g. Bloomreach) so they're sending a feed of product data to their vendor, just a subset of their product data (which may not have enough metadata for some facets people might reasonably expect). That means there's lag, and also that the integration is stiff and brittle, hard to change without time and money. Even then, whether they're rolling their own search or using a 3rd party, nine times out of ten their search will be ONLY for products, good luck if you wanted to search for a phrase from their privacy policy; for that or any sort of other non-product content you're forced to use Google/Bing/ddg etc.

What you're describing isn't "search", designed to give me information I asked for. It's a recommendation engine, designed to induce a behavior in me, whose input is the "search term" I entered (plus god knows what other tracking data). The distinction is important: the recommendation engine is designed to get me to buy something (not necessarily what I came to buy), whereas my intention was to buy something (or buy nothing, if they don't have it). Calling this recommendation engine "search" is IMO deceptive.

Maybe if I'm on Netflix to watch what's on, that's fine. But e.g. on Amazon, I find "search" so adversarial that I often close the tab and go somewhere else, or give up.

I can explain this.

About 15 years ago or so, together with a friend, we started a company whose goal was to offer a working product search for E-commerce.

Faceting was just one aspect of the problem, a much more pressing issue for non-English speaking countries is that you need a way to deal with declension and various misspellings (especially from people that do not enter accented characters). So we did. Solve the problems, that is. With a pretty good SaaS offering, reasonably easy to integrate into any E-commerce site.

And then we discovered that you can have a great product, but selling it is an entirely different problem, and we were not able to solve that problem. It turned out we were competing with marketing budgets: a customer (E-commerce site) could either pay us and improve the customer experience significantly, or they could spend this money on customer acquisition and improve the bottom line right away. Guess which approach won.

Another realization was that customer experience might actually not matter much. People are used to crappy websites and will jump through all sorts of hoops if the price is low. So many of our potential customers preferred to pay for customer leads (price comparison sites) and offer low prices, rather than improve customer experience, because customer loyalty isn't necessarily a thing these days.

Also, if your main acquisition channel is price comparison sites (which is the case in many countries), you don't care about search: customers will land directly on product pages (where the price is right) and will endure the crappy search to add some stuff to their carts.

We ended up with a bunch of happy customers who stayed with the product for years, but we stopped trying to sell it and moved to other things, it was just too hard to sell.

In other words, addressing the OP's (excellent) article: your hurt feelings don't matter much, and nobody really cares, as long as the customer acquisition funnel works and there is a steady increase in the bottom line numbers.