I'd love to believe that myself. I absolutely hate ineffective & irrelevant search results.

See Scott Adams, "Confusopoly" (2011): https://www.scottadamssays.com/2011/12/07/online-confusopoly...

I've touched on this: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/243in1/privacy...

The antipattern is sufficiently widely adopted that I've been. looking for possible dark-pattern justifications.

The original "confusopoly" link talked almost exclusively about pricing, and for good reason: pricing is based on numbers, which humans are bad at but computers are very good at, and every product in the catalog has a price, so it's easy to take the same tactic and apply it to all of the products.

I'm not sure trying to confuse people about whether a shirt has stripes on it would make as much sense. The purchaser seems likely to give up on picking an ideal shirt and just go with the cheapest result.

I thought I'd written on a more comparable gripe similar to the "shirt without stripes" problem in online commerce, the confusopoly item was the closest I could find readily. (Other is likely among my G+ take-out.)

Both though have the same essence: a manifestly confusing and annoying interface may be serving the merchant's interests.

See also Ling's Cars, possibly explaining awful Web design:

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/7tojtidef_l4r_sdbringw (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16921212)