Live data from Hacker News

Website search hurts my feelings

openmymind.net

181–190 of 201 posts

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#181

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…

This has already roots in real stores where they shuffle stuff so it is harder for you to search for just what you need. It was counter-intuitive for me at first. Because if I can't find in store/site what I need I just leave. But enough people will buy also other things that store put in their way. So broken search is feature, not bug.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#182

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…

Thanks for the recommendations! I also work on a decently large ecom site and search experience is a difficult problem - especially in aftermarket automotive.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#183
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s more like asking the clerk where to find the fruit salad and him giving you directions to strawberry ice cream.

You are both right. GP described intent of store, while you have described result.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#184
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

No, it's fine to offer similar products. Good on Netflix for this.

In the more general sense of the search topic, I don't want a search to return things they don't have. If it's out of stock, say so prominently. Don't make the user click through to the item itself only to see "out of stock".

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#186

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.

No there is just too much incentive for these sites to sabotage their search ... so they do, and nobody trusts them to actually find what they're looking for.

Amazon avoided that for a long time, but not anymore (imho). These days there's lots Amazon doesn't have, and their search seems designed to get you buying faked results. And this is the case for all commercial searches, but still less so for Google.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#187
post #18

My wife prefers to use curbside pickup for groceries, and orders via the Harris Teeter website. It’s a disaster. The site search picks up unrelated items, misses others, and so on. I would complain about the inventory management/substitutions too - but since they also have in store shoppers using the same inventory I guess they can’t always be 100% about what’s on the shelf. You’d think a chain that size could do bet…

I used to work on a regional grocery chain's website (in the Southern USA) for online ordering and fulfillment. It's a constant battle. Consider the sheer number of products on store shelves. The average number of products is 30k+. Now, consider that some percentage of those are constantly in flux and potentially unique per store. Holiday items, promotions, marketing from suppliers, overflow, etc etc. Anytime a price is changed or a product brought in/out of stock, that line in the database needs to be updated. Product images and nutrition information can also be in flux as companies adjust their products in response to supply chain or financing particulars.

At the end of the day, gathering and aggregating all of that crap into a stable API is a chore unto itself. Multiple people's jobs. Updating products, associating taxonomies, in-store locations, duplicate locations, optimizing pickup routes, etc etc etc. There is a lot of grunt work here that can't be entirely automated away when dealing such a dynamic business.

Now you need to build a website that takes all of this data and somehow displays it in a format that is comprehensible and accurate for consumers. Showing relevant recommended products, search keywords, cache and image management (for potentially resizing dynamic supplier photos). Then think about the cart and checkout, two areas and Shopify and Amazon have devoted literal billions of dollars to optimize. Your volume is big enough that using an off the shelf payment provider is off the table; not to mention that you don't have the margins anyway. Have you thought about mobile apps and the development effort required there as well?

Grocery stores are hard enough as is but doing them online is a totally different beast. There's a reason that all of the "Kroger" brands use the same exact website with a different logo in the corner. The only players in this space doing it reasonably well are huge conglomerates with money to burn on building the required infrastructure to build the audience. Actually, I just looked up Harris Teeter and they appear to be a Kroger brand as well. TIL. I would say that "Kroger" is one of the better ones. Whole Foods is also doing decently well if you can afford the price premium, but I realize for most people that isn't a luxury they can afford.

The best way to get them to improve is to keep using the service and demanding better (or use a competitor if available). These departments have KPIs. If you get the wrong product, file a complaint at the end of your order process and mark any NPS surveys appropriately. If fulfillment has a lot of bad data from elsewhere in the organization driving their performance scores down, then they are incentivized to get it fixed. I know it sucks, but the only other alternative is to not use it at all and risk is going away forever.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#188
I have worked on very large e-Commerce sites and it seems there are 2 common issues:

#1 a lot of teams are understaffed, overworked an not aligned, improving search is simply not a priority (at the same times, a lot of people are bored out of their mind, because of inefficient allocation of capacities). And of course, usable analytics data on search does not exist as it is hard to collect...

#2 search might be actually ok, but the quality of the catalog data is a nightmare - and the catalog is maintenance by a tiny team that overworked and underpaid. To add injury to insult, there is also no clear accountability established and 5 departments and a couple of vendors play the "not my problem" game. Sometimes 10-30% of the catalog is renewed every year and people gave up a long time ago to report problems.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#189
post #55
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst offender of this practice has to be the windows start menu. Even when you fully type the executable name, it can show up below the fold under unrelated results. Just try to get to display settings on windows these days through the start menu.

It is by design. You are talking about company which count from 3.11 to 11 going via 98. ...

And skipping 9

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#190
post #123
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re describing the problem from a computer scientist POV. OP is describing the problem from a user’s POV. Nobody cares if there’s a subset of their query in the title. That item is not “rice”. No one is searching for “rice” and wants soup. They would search for “soup” then. Tokens aren’t all of equal value in a title, and this is a big part of why ecom search is horribly bad (I have spent years working on ecom sea…

What if I want a rice-based ready meal, but don't know exactly what kind of meal yet (I'll know when I see it), so I'd like to search rice and see what's on offer?

Oh! Chicken and rice soup, I could go for that. Cart.

Post reply on HN