Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?

#11

Post by gcb » Thu, May 17, 2012, 5:30 AM UTC

woj wrote: post #9

I don't work at Amazon but worked at one of the largest comparison shopping sites in a core search group. Sorting by price is hard - if you really wanted to do a true price sort you end up with the long tail of products that match the term "ipod" (but are very loosely related to ipods) at the top of search results. Try searching for ipod in electronics and sorting by price.: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_…

There's no excuse like that for Amazon.

Ideally, you would click electronics category. Apple. IPod. Order by price. You didn't select category iPod accessories, so you shouldn't see them there

But some slob at Amazon sacrificed search by adding related crap

Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?

#12

Post by Danieru » Thu, May 17, 2012, 5:34 AM UTC

walrusgoatman wrote: post #6

mthreat wrote: post #5

They probably found that it increased sales by 0.7%.

They found that quasi-random ordering increased sales? That seems odd. What algorithm do you suppose they're using to order results? Random number generator?

If anyone in the existence of the Internet was best suited to experiment with sorting, it would be amazon. A 1% improvement for amazon pays for a department of engineers.

A department of engineers that can experiment with advanced search.

In the article's example, 'ipod', I think amazon's strategy is clear. They are sorting lowest to highest of what they think you might mean by 'ipod'. Does the user mean 'ipod [touch]'? 'ipod [nano]'? Or maybe 'ipod [accessory]'?

If they did the 'proper' substring based search to create a set which was then ordered by price you would only see ipod accessories for the first 100 pages. Which would be prefect if 100% of people who searched 'ipod' only wanted accessories. Which is not the case.

So amazon is 'cheating' to show users what want to increase sales, even if it drives us engineers up the wall.

Patio11 would be proud.

Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?

#13

Post by chime » Thu, May 17, 2012, 5:38 AM UTC

I wrote about this recently too, with some screenshots: http://chir.ag/201203161607

Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?

#14

Post by cdcarter » Thu, May 17, 2012, 5:39 AM UTC

gcb wrote: post #10

It's only bad because they are lazy greedy slobs. It's the easiest problem to solve. Just remove bad categorization. Open Amazon, click any category. Let's say hdmi cables. What do you see? Probably televisions, screws, microwave ovens, inflatable sex dolls, anything! They let bad Sellers fill their categories with crap. Now you can't search. And that's some kind of difficult problem to solve? Give me a break.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_4?rh=n%3A172282%...

Oh yea?

Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?

#15

Post by r00fus » Thu, May 17, 2012, 5:43 AM UTC

Anytime you see something that's relatively easy to solve by a major company but remains unsolved, either you don't realize how hard the problem really is, or the company is profiting from their "oversight". Apple could easily make a 2-disk-drive macbook, but they don't sell that configuration.

Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?

#16

Post by caladri » Thu, May 17, 2012, 5:49 AM UTC

At one point it seemed to me that the prices were sorted by the listed retail price for that particular item, and not the lowest offered price for it, or something along those lines. It's been years since I formed that wild guess, though. But it has seemed to roughly hold up when I'm (foolishly) trying to price-shop on Amazon.

Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?

#17

Post by woj » Thu, May 17, 2012, 6:02 AM UTC

gcb wrote: post #10

It's only bad because they are lazy greedy slobs. It's the easiest problem to solve. Just remove bad categorization. Open Amazon, click any category. Let's say hdmi cables. What do you see? Probably televisions, screws, microwave ovens, inflatable sex dolls, anything! They let bad Sellers fill their categories with crap. Now you can't search. And that's some kind of difficult problem to solve? Give me a break.

Compare to google:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbm=shop&q=ipod&...

Equally bad results in my opinion. I guess they are lazy greedy slobs too.

Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?

#18

Post by rhizome » Thu, May 17, 2012, 6:19 AM UTC

cdcarter wrote: post #14

gcb wrote: post #10

It's only bad because they are lazy greedy slobs. It's the easiest problem to solve. Just remove bad categorization. Open Amazon, click any category. Let's say hdmi cables. What do you see? Probably televisions, screws, microwave ovens, inflatable sex dolls, anything! They let bad Sellers fill their categories with crap. Now you can't search. And that's some kind of difficult problem to solve? Give me a break.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_4?rh=n%3A172282%... Oh yea?

Sort by price "high to low" and tell us if you see anything that doesn't look like an HDMI cable.

Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?

#19

Post by ajb » Thu, May 17, 2012, 6:35 AM UTC

gcb wrote: post #10

It's only bad because they are lazy greedy slobs. It's the easiest problem to solve. Just remove bad categorization. Open Amazon, click any category. Let's say hdmi cables. What do you see? Probably televisions, screws, microwave ovens, inflatable sex dolls, anything! They let bad Sellers fill their categories with crap. Now you can't search. And that's some kind of difficult problem to solve? Give me a break.

That's what I thought the article would say, too!

Actually, it's complaining that the items are not even sorted correctly.

Re: Why Doesn't Amazon's Price Sort Work?

#20

Post by Daniel_Newby » Thu, May 17, 2012, 6:44 AM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #15

Anytime you see something that's relatively easy to solve by a major company but remains unsolved, either you don't realize how hard the problem really is, or the company is profiting from their "oversight". Apple could easily make a 2-disk-drive macbook, but they don't sell that configuration.

I'm not so sure in the case of Amazon. Their requirements analysis process appears immune to customer feedback.