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.
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.