Another possibility is search is hard. If all they returned is things with "Pixel 3" well, that includes "Pixel 3 XL". Ok so they look for exact string "Pixel 3". Now nothing matches like "Red Pixel 3 Case"

note, I have never implemented search but suspect it's hard problem.

Still Amazon's search is pretty awful. I've found adding something in the category I want to my cart gets me better results than being on the item itself. In other words I might search for "wrench" and it shows me 50 items of which 2 are remotely close the the type of wrench I'm looking for. I click one, get new page for that product and below it shows other wrenches but they aren't remotely like the one the page is for. So I add it to my cart and suddenly it suggests a bunch of stuff that is actually close to what I wanted.

I also don't understand the pitching me things I already bought. I get pitching me disposables I already bought. I don't get pitching me a monitor or soldering iron or another mouse or keyboard. I'd think either via statistical analysis or via manual tagging they could figure out what items are more likely to be purchased again and not recommend another PS4 just after I bought a PS4? But who knows. It could be this is harder than it sounds or it could also be they suck at search or haven't gotten around to it yet or ...

Pretty sure that Amazon search is bad on purpose... For a while they didnt even allow you to sort search results unless you selected a category (some products can be in multiple or wrong categories so you ended up hiding good results if you selected a category).

There is a 3rd possibility: sellers are completing the product page with incorrect metadata. This might even be down to simple user error eg someone non-technical given the data entry job.

I'm not saying Amazon isn't full of dark patterns and other problems but if there is one thing I've noticed on nearly every online store since the dawn of online shopping, it's that there is always the odd product that has been incorrectly classified. This problem only becomes magnified when you allow 3rd parties to complete product pages.

For me though, the most annoying anti-pattern goes to eBay and how it will bulk out it's results with items from other countries even when you specifically state a local region.

Presumably their data shows them that if they mix in some monitors that aren't 1440p or aren't IPS that customers still sometimes buy those monitors anyway. From Amazon's perspective the search functionality is more of a product discovery functionality. If they only showed what the customer was searching for they would miss out on sales to people who didn't start out with a clear idea of what they wanted.

fine, then come to a middle-ground:

search bar (on the top) for window-shoppers

selection boxes (on the left) for focus-shoppers

If I select 1440p under Resolution, I do not want non-1440p monitors in search results.

The biggest problem with the selection boxes (when they do appear) is the garbage data. In this scenario, you'd get something like "1440p" "1440 pixels" and "1.4KP", sorted nowhere near each other.

Two days later, I'm looking at listings for Pet Supplies > Fish Food, and one of the filter categories is "Number of players".

Audible does this thing where when I search for an author, it constructs a bag of words based on the titles of books that show up for that author, then retrieve based on that bag of words, then rank by like popularity of the returned books. So if a different, more popular author has written books with similar titles (which is very easy given a trilogy with storm-themed titles) you will occasionally see a book by the wrong author as the number one result.

Every time it happens I want to quit my job and force them to hire me to fix it.

Yea i've seen this many times with price comparison engines, i even used to work for one and was head of search back then. We had to actually "tune/down-weight" phone accessories vs phones. Ppl typing in "iphones" wants "iphones". Ppl typing in iphone cases wants "iphone cases". The rudimentary problem is both of the text tokens are in the titles and are popular products. "precision vs recall vs popularity/sorting". We had a similar but lesser problem with books (the titles are so vast and ambiguous). Lol you get a book called 'iphone'. The leading ecomm platform in my country (s.a) has this book problem in search results and mm-tokens still. Looking at you T..A..L ;).

End of the day, search is hard and personal.

> If I search for Pixel 3 case on Amazon, it will also return Pixel 3 XL cases.

In reverse, someone looking for a Pixel 3 XL cases but only wrote Pixel 3 cases, would have been much more pissed than you were if it was has specific has you want.