Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perfect. While I've never been as deep in the details, my perpetual answer here is: "You're so vain, I bet you think this search is about you?" I understand it because people are human, but I can't help but feel annoyance when people are like "the search engine isn't doing what I want!" It's not designed to DO THAT, it's designed to maximize it's own sales and we're pretty much at the point where we should try to sto…
It's not vanity to complain that a faceted search tool is surfacing completely useless facets populated by obviously-wrong data and actively lying to the user about the number of results in each facet. Or returning completely unrelated products like an umbrella in a search for laundry detergent in the top 3 results. Users should expect better. People with your attitude are not helping.
Actually…
Consider this: the goal for the E-commerce site is to make more money. If showing unrelated products in search results brings in more revenue than showing the products the customer actually searched for — then that's what will be done.
This is not theoretical, I actually know of this being done on purpose.