Amazon attempts to do some product categorization but it doesn't work at all - even when they have the category you want to filter on the results are usually wrong, and the sort options are bad and marred by their ads and recommendations.
What I like most about Prisjakt is that they don't try to second guess what I want given a basic search phrase. Instead, Prisjakt gives me the categories to drill down into tables. Sortable and filterable tables with product name, price, rating, and category-specific columns (like storage size and $/GB for hard drives). The filters run DEEP. If you're looking for a HDR display, you can be happy with a "HDR" filter but also opt into DisplayHDR 1000 certified displays with 120+ Hz. For the entire Sweden because every decent Swedish retail chain and store is on this website, and they have everything between solid state drives and shoes in their database. If you look for watches you have filters and columns for e.g. automatic, solar powered watches, etc.
Amazon is very, very different. They're also a front to various stores but try to make it appear like THEY are the store when they are really not. Prisjakt instead just has this razor sharp focus on making you in charge of the data and forming decisions based on that, and then when the decision is made, presents you a list of the stores with that product and their respective prices. You are in control and maybe you prefer a certain one because you're a long time user there and like them.
So Amazon becomes a "fake store front" (like Sweden's CDON) and Prisjakt is more like just a database. One optimized for usability and presentation.
That is a wonderful feature, not a bug. I wish all websites would go back to 2010 era.
The usability alone of Prisjakt is incredible. It's not in-your-face like the shit that's being invented in 2020s.
It's completely impossible to tell good quality stuff from useless garbage (especially since they are usually commingled in the same listing), and often it's impossible to find good quality stuff at all under the barrage of listings of the same two products with different fake brand names. The sorting options are a joke and the ratings are gamed so much they indicate nothing except how much the seller spent buying reviews.
It's amazing that Google hasn't been able to do better here.
although I can't seem to find the followup post that actually discusses how the Yandex search quality decreased following the publication of the original article
And then there was the genomics or DNA database or something that a couple of people were running out of their garage (well, a bit more than that) but then had to shut down after law enforcement discovered it, found it incredibly useful, and everything rapidly went sideways as "things aren't supposed to work that way"... but I'm having the hardest time finding the link for this one sadly ._.
EDIT (just within the 1hr window :): I think the second one was GEDmatch. A quick search of https://hn.algolia.com/?query=gedmatch didn't relocate what I remember reading, but I think this was it.
Why?
It's basically just a large catalog of products, filled by third-parties a-la Amazon now, only it didn't sell anything itself (until recently). Instead, it had detailed characteristics for a lot of products, with corresponding filters in the catalog; and good user reviews. Since Yandex is good at dealing with unstructured text, even poor data exports by vendors end up organized decently on the service. Since Yandex had millions of users on its other services, they all could leave reviews without much hassle. And since Yandex is primarily a search engine, it knows when a bogus review is spammed across the web.
Alas, it's only available in Russian since it works with Russian shops. Every time I need to look for a product on the English web, I lament that there's no service that is quite that solid. Amazon has filters, but search results usually look like simply a bit better Aliexpress. In regard to Google Product Search I don't even know anything particular—I tried to use it a couple times, and my general impression is that it... exists. Not much else.