Ask HN: What's Going on with Amazon Search?

[mywaifuismeta]

There has been a lot of talk around how Google search is becoming worse. Like many others, I am appending "reddit" to almost every search to get useful results instead of low-quality spam.

Over the last few years I feel the same has been happening to Amazon. There have always been FBA sellers that buy from Chinese suppliers and re-brand the same base product, result in tons of different-looking-but-actually-same products. But it has never been as bad as now. It's has become nearly impossible to find quality products in all the spam, sponsored ads, fake reviews, and rebrandings.

I am now finding myself appending "reddit" to my Amazon searches as well because I don't trust the results! Does anyone else do the same?

[mabbo]

The simple answer is that "Customer Obsession" is dead.

Amazon is now so dominant that improving search to help customers find what they actually want would reduce profits. The top search results are paid ads. Why distract from those with good top organic results? That just reduces the value of those ads. And those ads are big business.

Projects at Amazon are approved during the yearly OP1/OP2 planning cycle and are prioritized based on how much money the project will make. A project to fix the 'problems' has negative overall value, so it won't ever make the list.

[mikequinlan → mabbo]

Amazon is still very much customer obsessed. The problem is that you are no longer the customer; their customers are the millions of scammy businesses that sell on their site.

[suresk → mabbo]

I have hundreds of books, partially due to how good Amazon's book recommendations used to be. They are now mostly paid ads as well, and are of much lower quality.

It definitely feels like a very un-Amazon thing to do, unless the lens you look at it through is "Customers really care most about price and charging sellers for ads lets us lower prices", but that feels like a stretch?

[kwatsonafter → mabbo]

I think this is what's going to fuel the next phase of what some are referring to as, "Digital Enclosure." What's extra scary is you have an up-and-coming generation that's going to accept this kind of thing as status quo. What's even worse is that you've got a huge mass of recently disenfranchised people in the United States that might be, "consent manufacturer'd" to militarize themselves to defend a system that's systemically locking them out #ThinBlueLine (?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_enclosure

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung

[moepstar]

Basically, yes - this has been a thing the last 5 years or something like that (and seemingly getting worse)...

Its gotten to a point i actively avoid buying on Amazon - however, i find the reviews still useful, if you only look at all negative ones.

If you filter by the negative reviews, there'll of course be people that have no clue how to use the product and will complain, those that complain that the packaging was damaged, a used product was received from seller x etc...

If you mentally filter out all of those - as they don't concern the product itself - you should be able to see a pattern regarding the products quality. More than 20 people out of 1000s of review complain about some switch falling apart directly after unboxing? That may be a valid complaint then...

[autoexec → moepstar]

> however, i find the reviews still useful, if you only look at all negative ones.

this used to be enough for me too. You do have to have to sift through a lot of useless complaining, but it was worth it to find something that you know would drive you crazy or wasn't compatible with what you had in mind. Unfortunately, Amazon managed to screw that up to by slapping the same reviews on very different products.

If I'm looking at what seems to be a nice pair of headphones to wear while cleaning around the house but don't buy them because multiple people say they slip off your head easily when looking down I could easily find a friend who has those same pair without that problem because they fixed that issue with the current model.

You have the same problem with positive reviews. A good feature (reliability, quality materials, etc) may not be true when it arrives. At first I thought it was just because I was getting very accurate knock off products (which can happen) but it turns out amazon is just a terrible online store. It leads to a lot of conflicting product reviews like "this is the only product I've found that lasted for more than 6 months and I love the metal accents!" right next to "This is 100% plastic and broke after 3 months of light use. Waste of money"

[kodon]

This video parodies the issue pretty well. The names of the products are out of control.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30

[voussoir → kodon]

Shopping on Amazon is like shopping on AliExpress, but in denial. Nowadays I just go straight to AliExpress and embrace the whitelabeled keyword soup that doesn't pretend to be anything else. At least it's an honest experience.

[tomcam → kodon]

He is insanely productive and he’s always funny af. Thanks because I didn’t know about this other channel.

[conqueso]

As an aside - the search experience in the Amazon music app is laughably bad. The suggestion engine seems to be basically the same as retail, weighing by popularity of the search terms. But the search terms are not limited to music app, so frequently the suggestion will append words like " vinyl " or " t-shirt ". Perhaps even more frustrating, top results will often be a partial match a highly popular artist / album / song even if you give an exact string match for something else that has a decent level of uniqueness or has recently been listened to.

[dudeinsf]

Yes, absolutely. On one level I understand how big tech bureaucracy, politics, and layered management structures cause this to happen. Another part of me is floored, that so many brilliant people absorbed into these companies have let this happen.

Twitter and reddit have a massive opportunity here to capitalize. I know many moons ago, Twitter had re-positioned itself to have a search bar on their homepage. Not sure what happened there.

Timely that reddit has released their comment search this week. Looking forward to trying that out.

[slater]

Yep, same. Especially since they've recently started ignoring the boolean " - [whatever has SEO'd the everliving shit out of my search]"

[ffhhj]

I just search a product similar to what I need, even if it's bad quality when I add it to the cart I'll get recommendations for the good ones with better price. Carefully check the comments for non-spam. Haven't had problems using this method. The search engine is optimizing to get FBA crap out of their warehouse before it rots/explodes.

[AuryGlenz]

I don't understand why Amazon isn't doing more about this problem. Perhaps it's because consumers would rather buy the cheap crap?

At the very least they should somehow be grouping up products with the exact same product images. It's really fun to wade through listings of light fixtures from well known manufacturers such as IBESTWIN and COLMEGUNA.

[autoexec → AuryGlenz]

> Perhaps it's because consumers would rather buy the cheap crap?

Nope. Even if it were true that people actually want garbage products (and I doubt that to be the case for most of us) we still want to be able to find the garbage products!

It used to be that as long as you knew exactly what you wanted amazon search was OK. Searching for something like "Shower curtains" would always just return a very small number of products listed over and over again but never all of the shower curtains they have for sale. Now, even searches for very specific things return bizarre nonsensical results.

My guess is that it's a combination of Amazon just not caring about the user experience, Amazon wanting to promote only certain items, and Amazon wanting to prevent scrapers from being able to easily get large lists of products on the website and what their prices are.

[vishnugupta]

I use Google to search Amazon products. As a last resort I search by the exact product name. Amazon search has always been garbage and with 3rd party seller products flooding Amazon it was bound to get worse.

Amazon (at least in India) resembles flea market at this point; don't shop for expensive products and buy only from big brand stores.

[autoexec → vishnugupta]

> I use Google to search Amazon products

I'd recommend avoiding that generally since it's just handing Google a list of your amazon purchases (and it's bad enough to have Amazon using that data against you), but Google will just buy lists of your purchases from the credit card companies or your bank anyway

[spzb → autoexec]

How does a credit card company know what I'm buying? They only see the vendor and the value

[autoexec → spzb]

With enough other data points it's enough to verify what you got. Google's willing to spend millions to get this data for exactly that reason.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/30/17801880/google-mastercar...

[8note → autoexec]

If you've got a Gmail account, what's the difference?

[autoexec → 8note]

True enough, Google will look through your email (and other google services) for receipts and order confirmations to figure you what you're buying. Obviously anything you buy using Google pay will give them info too. The more google products and services you use the more they will know about you. Still, while you can never hope to starve the beast, it's best not to feed it any more than you have to.

[slater → autoexec]

Wasn't there some blurb making the rounds that that's exactly why Amazon stopped listing WHAT has shipped to you? i.e. they used to send you an e-mail, itemizing all your stuff you have coming. Now they just send you a "your order has been delivered" e-mail with a link for more info.

[mission_failed]

When shopping for anything it's hard to say which is worse between Google shopping search and Amazon.

A normal Google search for a GPU gets relavent results, switching to shopping search now has crap from aliexpress and overseas, most of which don't even match the search terms (was trying to find an Rx580 8gb, googled shopping had 1 correct item, the rest were 6600 gpus..)

Meanwhile Amazon is just broken. Sorting by price doesn't, filters are broken. Tick prime shipping only still gives 3rd party results that want to charge shipping.

Amazon won't even return all the results for products they are fulfilling. I'm regularly seeing deals on bargain sites where an items page will list a cheaper option, which is also sent by Amazon... But this option isn't shown in any searches

[thunkshift1]

Amazon search was broken from day 1. My experience has been that its optimized for what amazn wants you to buy vs what you actually want to buy. Not just search, the sorting and filtering is shit quality as well.

[Traubenfuchs]

It has become so bad, it‘s ready for disruption.

Amazon, what are you doing?