Then searching for "odicht" out of curiousity, they auto-correct it to "olight". So I start with almond-based sugar sweets, follow their auto-correct twice and now I'm staring at headlamps. And even Google has no idea what "odicht" might have been, so I really wonder how Amazon decided to auto-correct from an existing product into a non-word.
Searching for "odense marzipan" including the quotes then works, but it yields the cringe-worthy message:
Your search ""odense marzipan"" was automatically translated into "„odense marzipan“".
(where the only difference between the first and the second thing is that they converted the ascii quotes to up and down sentence quotes)
A while back I spent a lot of time looking around for a basic SATA bluray drive on Amazon before finally giving up. All I could find was burners for several hundred dollars when I really just needed a drive to quickly rip a single disc I'd bought. I spent probably an hour scrolling through results and trying all sorts of variations on search strings.
I eventually gave up and punched it in Google to get... kicked back to Amazon to a simple, cheap SATA bluray drive that had been there all along.
This is exactly it. Amazon isn't a shopping site, they're a corporation using third party sellers to offload the risk and cost of providing a wide array of goods. They let customers experiment with product offerings, find products that sell using their web site, then cherry pick the most lucrative ones to produce and stock to compete with their own "customers".
They're not a service for anyone but themselves.
What I don't get about this companies (because this seems a problem shared between google, YT and Amazon) is when they optimize for clicks or whatever their KPI, what are they thinking is the outcome in the mid term?
I mean, IDK around you, but I'm the prosumer regular folks ask for recommendations. They may be safe for the time being but of course I'm going to contribute for their competitors getting klout.
I don't have an alternative for YT, but people watches me using DDG and whe they ask for recommendations for buying stuff I don't even bother with Amazon.
I'm not the type who pushes his decisions onto others, but I already got asked why I don't use google and amazon.
I just tried using Amazon.com to order something to Hong Kong for Christmas - sweet Jesus I don't know why anyone would ever visit that site more than once. I ended up giving up and just ordering the things with the co.uk version and sending them myself.
They extra postage cost is nothing compared to the insanity of the .com site.
only to have it disappear somewhere to page 2 or 3 (if even!)
There's got to be a reason no-one (to my knowledge) has done this: They probably forbid affiliates from doing their own indexing and ranking. Does anyone know for sure?
They do. I came across a reddit thread where a guy had built a simple php-based search indexer for Amazon and managed to pay for his college through it. After this incident they apparently put changed their developer terms of service!
Just try searching for a high-end appliance and watch all the Chinese knockoffs that will get ranked higher than the actual thing you're looking to buy. Sure, they cost less, therefore you're more likely to buy something therefore such changes tend to win web labs and go into production. But they've completely destroyed the intent of the search doing so.
Now shopping on Amazon feels like shopping on eBay or Aliexpress with fast shipping. Everything name-brand could be counterfeit, and everything no-name is a complete gamble.
There is an actual product (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084GKQB9T) with all of my keywords in the title. I found it via a google search because I gave up scrolling through Amazon.
I actively avoid shopping Amazon where possible these days, just because it's such a trashy experience.
I very much get the feeling that amazon and eBay "Don't like" Denmark – the former redirects amazon.dk to amazon.de saying "we deliver!" and the latter doesn't exist (but it does wholly-own a local alternative). Going to Denmark always makes me aware of how good the local Danish things are, and how inflexible and annoying the "global" options usually are by comparison. Riding roughshod over the language is a good example of this.
(And that leaves aside the issue of the product page of a really nice wastebasket I bought years ago being hijacked by a meat slicer.)
The product is there. It works adding the company name.
Rather weird if true, but I can't really disagree with your observation. It seems like large parts of the web have disappeared in the last five to ten years.
Google do most likely index the sites, but their current algorithm just don't use them, because it as much a promotion algorithm at it is search.
Search for "github drv8830pico" - it's literally not in any results.
Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse? https://news.ycombinator.com › item 4 hours ago — But of course, it's still on GitHub. ... Search for "github drv8830pico" - it's literally not in any results.
DuckDuckGo works fine, though.
Maybe there's no links to it from other places, or somewhere on github thats crawled / indexed frequently enough.
Considering this comment thread is seemingly quickly indexed, just posting this link might be enough!
GitHub does fit the "huge website with lots of duplicate content" description very well.
Then again, Twitter seems to be doing fine. But I have a suspicion that they have some sort of agreement (and GitHub doesn't), because I have to regularly "report as spam" (note how that implies Google decides what's spam and what isn't) Twitter emails and they still pop up in the inbox after a while.
It might be anti-spam, but how is it this shit?
Man, ads really are the devil.
Google News too has become flaky. Often does not find stuff you know is there, or finds it one day, but not another. Hrmph.
There was a time I thought I'd trained it to stop telling me about what celebrity said or wore what, but those are creeping back into my feed.
I absolutely hate the Google has changed the semantics of search so that it doesn't really pay attention to your keywords unless you quote them. In Google's mind you're not serious about a keyword until you quote it! Garbage!
What does the business model look like? Ads (it would be in front of a very valuable audience of technical folks)? Or paid subscriptions (perhaps the community votes which resources get crawled / indexed)
Most of my searches are for really old pages or really long tail stuff and Google just simply doesn't bubble them up, if it has them at all. I keep finding web sites lately from links on other sites and find myself asking "Why the fuck did Google not find this?" .. then I go back to Google and try to find it with keywords from the site, and nothing...
Also, I am by now 100% sure that Google has just stopped indexing the long tail. Like if I search for function names of public source code that I downloaded from GitHub, Google won't find it. But of course, it's still on GitHub.
Similarly, Google will sometimes not find a single result for some Windows API function names, despite them being publicly documented on docs.microsoft.com.