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Website search hurts my feelings

openmymind.net

171–180 of 201 posts

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#171
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.

Um, no? That's not what I want when I search.

On the other end of the spectrum, try Digikey:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded/microcon...

or try McMaster Carr:

https://www.mcmaster.com/products/screws/socket-head-screws~...

Functional, well-tagged, data-driven parametric search. Rockauto.com sells auto parts, which requires a whole different type of search, but they deliver a pretty impressive product as well.

I suspect that much of this discrepancy is because there's enough of a chance that someone grocery shopping and looking for lentils will think "Oh, I need pancake mix too" and click on the ad. Meanwhile, someone looking for a specific grade of M8x25 socket-head cap screws or a low-power Cortex-M0 microcontroller with a particular set of peripherals is unlikely to abandon their work to add a hose clamp or electrolytic capacitor to their cart instead.

Market forces seem incapable of delivering a product with a better user experience if that hurts the bottom line even a little bit, they're doing gradient descent to local minima and powerless to say "no" to finance and climb out of the awful product that results.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The examples were about a keyword or two (“lentils”, “laundry detergent”, etc) and filters.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#173
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…

> because customer loyalty isn't necessarily a thing these days.

Probably because so many companies have burned that loyalty for short term gains. It isn't worth being loyal to a company if at any time they can decide to throw those loyal customers under a bus to make a quick buck.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#174
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> What makes the alcohol/alcohol-free problem is that alcohol free is one token that can't be subdivided.

It's not even a problem... it's an unfounded assumption that alcohol-free wine wouldn't ever be relevant to the user at all. If the only place open on a holiday was Walmart that I didn't realize didn't sell booze, and I needed some kind of booze to make a pan sauce or a braise, I wouldn't necessarily think to search for non-alcoholic booze-- but it would be a very useful substitution for me, and not by accident... they're two versions of the same product. I'd much rather see that they had non-alcoholic beer and wine in my search than completely empty search results.

This is why competent companies hire designers to work on interactions like this rather than leaving it up to the implementing developer's gut instinct about user needs. If only the tagging could keep up.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#176
Faceting is a deceptively hard problem to solve because it requires understanding the features of the products within the categories of products within the ecosystem of products a seller is selling, and dividing them up based on how a customer is likely to be thinking about the products. If you're selling clothing, the customer is likely going to mean something different with the word "long" than they would mean if they were searching for foods. Within different categories of clothing the word "long" is going to mean different things.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the same thing for Google indeed, they are getting paid by the search ads so they don't care of the quality of what's below those.

As long as the market share is that high, there's no reason to improve anything.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's the same thing for Google indeed, they are getting paid by the search ads so they don't care of the quality of what's below those. As long as the market share is that high, there's no reason to improve anything.

This reply is to a comment gently indicating we've arrived at an obviously wrong conclusion.

Gliding past that with "Google [doesn't] care [about] search quality" doesn't add much.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#179
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?".

but netflix doesn't tell you that. if they don't have what you searched for, it shows you other things they DO have that are similar.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#180
Industry, please give us good search tools like those for researching articles: ("fog" near "coastline") AND ("lighthouse"). Or that offer regular expressions so I can search with precision.

I got used to good search tools in grad school, and then came Google. And ever since I've not gotten better than a result salad. Sometimes a tasty salad, but still a salad.

And, to be complete, firms like Nerac offer good search tools, but you need to work with someone who performs the search for you (last I used them).

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