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A comment on What does it mean when a product is “Amazon’s Choice”?. Parent comment

Re:What does it mean when a product is “Amazon’s Choice”? by throwaway1280 on Tuesday June 04, 2019 @05:42PM (#20099553)
Yup. There was a famous memo from Jeff that went round years ago that read something like "I want to buy a kettle. I search for 'kettle' and I get thousands of products. That sucks - now I have to comparison shop for kettles, when I don't particularly care what sort of kettle I get. Why can't Amazon just tell me 'buy this one'?"

Amazon's choice arrived years after my tenure at the big A, and I'm not sure it's directly connected, but it definitely helps solve this problem.

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Re:What does it mean when a product is “Amazon’s Choice”? by losteric on Tuesday June 04, 2019 @07:48PM (#20100298)
That's a blindfold, not a solution.

If I told a personal assistant "I want any kettle", they would know there's an implied <among buy-it-for-life high-quality stainless steel in America with a non-garish finish>.

They would also know me well enough to provide options when it's a non-commodity context, ie pressure cookers where the same implied values hold but I want to actually made the feature tradeoffs as a poweruser.

YouTube went down then global optimization path, and the experience was terrible...

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