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Website search hurts my feelings

openmymind.net

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Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#161

Post by mvdtnz »

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.

Netflix search is possibly the most egregiously bad search in the entire industry, and unfortunately it's infecting other players with very stupid ideas. Netflix search is unfaceted, unsortable, unfilterable and worst of all it very often knows what you're searching for and instead of returning "we don't have this title" it will return a bunch of different, loosely related titles.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#162

Post by esafak »

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…

> 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.

That's the definition of a table stakes feature. It's not as if you can not implement it and people won't notice!

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#163

Post by kamikaz1k »

esafak wrote: post #160
jwr wrote: post #149

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…

I think whether or not it matters is contextual. If I am trying to get work done, or trying to buy something on your site I very much care if search works. UX is a feature. You can acquire customers with lower prices, but can you keep them with a bad UX?

The answer is clearly yes…

It’s a feature but not the only feature. Ppl complain about Google search (arguably their only feature) on HN everyday, but they’re still essentially a monopoly.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#164

Post by slig »

tempestn wrote: post #159
scotty79 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should have pivoted and become price comparison site with good product search.

Comparison sites are predominantly not about good search either, but rather affiliate relationships.

And borderline SERP spam tactics to get organic visitors.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#165

Post by Solvency »

nox100 wrote: post #102
ano-ther wrote: post #84

Tagging ins tedious. Especially when it’s not you who searches but lots of other people, all with their specific ways of describing what they are looking for. And yes, the results are between amusing, annoying and infuriating. The “alcohol” example finding mostly comes from alcohol free products advertising this feature in their name - no need to name your regular beer or wine “with alcohol”, at least not in the prod…

tagging doesn't work period because people will tag things to try to get their product in front of your eyes and add any tag they think is popular entirely unrelated to their "product".

So why not punish them and have bots regularly scan/assess tags for relevance.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#166

Post by Solvency »

binarymax wrote: post #157
Solvency wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The searchable content may be constrained, but the queries aren’t ;) Search is hard because you need to anticipate and model the language of all potential searchers and the content. There’s also lots of ambiguity because you’ll only get one or two keywords from the searcher without any other context, and you need to take into account trends and content quality and metadata. Also, in lots of cases search is bad becaus…

But his examples were about hardcoded filters/facets.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#167

Post by scotty79 »

tempestn wrote: post #159
scotty79 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should have pivoted and become price comparison site with good product search.

Comparison sites are predominantly not about good search either, but rather affiliate relationships.

So the conclusion must be there's exactly zero value in good search. No wonder google gets worse and worse.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#168

Post by earthboundkid »

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.

The last time I used Craigslist to apartment hunt, people spam the listings with the name of places 30 minutes away for some reason, as though I would just give up on living in the neighborhood I was searching for if I saw there was something somewhere completely different at a price that wasn't even that good.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#169

Post by esafak »

kamikaz1k wrote: post #163
esafak wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think whether or not it matters is contextual. If I am trying to get work done, or trying to buy something on your site I very much care if search works. UX is a feature. You can acquire customers with lower prices, but can you keep them with a bad UX?

The answer is clearly yes… It’s a feature but not the only feature. Ppl complain about Google search (arguably their only feature) on HN everyday, but they’re still essentially a monopoly.

Their monopoly status is why they can get away with it; don't copy them. And don't forget that their early attention to UX, with a spartan UI, and famously fast and good response is what made them succeed in the first place.

Users are deciding that chatGPT offers a better search UX in some cases and abandoning Google.

So the answer is "No, unless you are a monopoly, and even then don't push your luck."

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#170

Post by lightbendover »

lukevp wrote: post #128
regularjack wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implementing search correctly would solve the problem too, without requiring a square kilometer of GPUs.

If you have >100k items, “implementing search correctly” is an intractable problem if you don’t have a hundred person team of search relevance optimizers and taggers. Search is terrible until you gather tons of metadata about each item. Search is not nearly as simple as text matching within product titles. An LLM by comparison is peanuts. You could run it overnight and just have it build tags and metadata for all you…

At Amazon scale that last x% is a multi-decade problem and still going. It’s intractable full stop.
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