I also always wonder how companies can simultaneously offer to sell their highly advanced AI-bla search, yet utterly fail at searching themselves.

I still remember the time when Google tried to license their search servers to enterprises. It appears that market has now been completely eaten by Algolia. And my hunch is that it's because Google's search results are completely irrelevant for professional users. I search for a Windows API function name, and I get pages of SEO spam trying to sell me an unrelated Udemy beginner's course.

It's truly amazing. You need to type way too much of the title, and even then you may not get that, you may get seasons 1-45, which are inexplicably different items on the result, of something you didn't search for at all.

Of the 3 services I subscribe to, only Amazon gets things so wrong so often.

Funny story, just yesterday some friends and I were trying to watch "You're Next" as it is free with Prime. We found the properly spelled entry but it only offered to add it to a watchlist. There was another entry, titled "You're Next'" (note the trailing single quote) that was the actual movie and available to watch. My only guess is some peculiar manual data-entry mistake but that doesn't really explain the correctly titled entry...

That's not bad UI, it's malicious UI. They're doing that because in many regions their streaming selection is pitiful. I guess the US is better?

No the US has a mediocre selection on Prime.

Do you know of any articles on what is wrong with Prime UI? I am writing up a proposal to fix a similar service that also has really bad UI - I would like to see if there are intersections between them.

No article I know of, but I'm happy to start a chain of complaints here:

- When you search for a title, even if that title is in their library, odds are the exact match won't be the first result

- The differentiation between what is rentable, purchasable and freely streamable (with gradations based on different subscriptions) is incomprehensible from the listings pages.

The following is just for desktop browsers, since I haven't tried their app:

- they split their shows by season to make their catalogue look bigger, but it's more confusing for the user

- don't make it explicit on the thumbnail either, so you have to hover over it to know what season of the show we're talking about

- although they do a decent job at continuing to watch episodes in a season, they're not making it clear when you've already watched entire seasons and those remain on the screen and are recommended to you over and over again

- advertise a trailer as an entire new season (see: The Boys season 2), leading to pretty gigantic disappointment (vs the netflix experience where a red notification for something you like is actually a great surprise because you KNOW it's an actual release)

- have a lower chance of being able to reload a page of something you left mid-watch and the page successfully reloading to the right content and timestamp

- the overflow of their preview hides the show underneath the current one which means any directly vertical scrolling is infuriating because you will trigger the overflow of the show underneath (that you see 20% of) only after having gone vertically down beyond 80% of the div in question

- the line = product line thing is confusing, as everything starts with "prime" for a full screen, (so why the repetition? oh, it's because ->) suddenly you get news (I don't care about them) and movies to rent or buy (I also don't care about paying prime to pay on top of it)

Don't forget that UHD versions are separate from their SD/HD versions and sometimes OV versions are separate from subbed versions that are sperate from dubbed versions. So you end up with ~6 search results for the same movie. Beware of what you buy.

Searching for Inception goves me results like Deadpool, Mom and a host of irrelevant shows!