Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon Search is now nearly completely useless for any kind of targeted search. Heaven help you if you're looking for a product without a certain attribute most other products like it all have. There is quite literally no way to filter results against one attribute. Even if Amazon has that product, you won't be able to find it. I eventually just scripted a separate search engine query that's site specific to Amazon.…
Oh my god I ran into this yesterday. I wanted a very specific kind of underarmour sweat pants. It gave me every other company competing with underarmour and a bunch of things that are not sweat pants. It’s like they’re not even trying to do “search” any more, but instead just feed your search string into their ad auction system and give you the results. There’s just no way to actually get a specific thing.
It's maddening because Amazon used to have a modern, reasonably capable search function. You could require terms. You could exclude terms. Terms could be phrases. I'm sure they still have all these capabilities, they've just decided to intentionally disable them because their A/B testing indicated that breaking their search would return a fractional percent more revenue by shoveling more unrelated results in front customers. It must work on someone but it's never worked even once on me, because I KNOW what I need and I'm only going to buy exactly that - if I can fucking find it.
I'd actually be okay to let Amazon annoy the NPCs who just clickety-click and buy whatever random shiny shit they shovel in front of them, IF they'd just add something for us technically-minded, engineering type people who are looking for one precise thing only. They can even hide it behind an arcane interface like REGEX. That'll keep the rabble out! :-)