Yes. Just try to use it on a slightly poor mobile signal, like when actually in a Home Depot store.

I'm remodeling a house and I end up having to go to one of three HD stores that are each about five miles from the house. Each is in a slightly different area demographically and thus has a different selection of stuff, and each has a very different layout.

Their listing of stock and aisle/bin makes it easy to find what I need, but the site is so awful on mobile that I'll often look things up at home on a full PC, write down locations, then go.

On mobile I've seen the layout shift all over, the search break if I touch something or scroll after I submit a query, checking the "in stock items" box sometimes breaks my session. It's awful.

I'd suggest using the app over the mobile website. If you are in store, it will tell you where in the store the items are (Bay and Aisle) which is super useful.

The site will do that too, without being an app installed on my device collecting... stuff? If only it'd work well.

(I tend to eschew apps however much I can. But maybe I should just suck it up until this project is done.)

The Home Depot mobile app is pretty nice. It's significantly easier and faster to use, especially while in a store. Along with the quick location toggles/searches, it's worth checking out.

The results here look fine to me in positions 3 and 4 - https://www.homedepot.com/s/2'x4'%2520piece%2520of%2520birch...

What are you expecting to see? I worked on this search engine so interested to get feedback, good or bad (bad is actually more useful!).

Hopefully this does not sound snarky, but I expect to see 2'x4' birch plywood, in 1/2" and 3/4", in the first two slots!

4'x8' sheets are fine, but later in the results.

2"x4" lumber should not appear and is like showing me a toilet when I want a sink. Also see my reply below.

Well almost half the results on the page are 4x8's, when explicitly searching for 2x4's for one.

It does semantic matching. We don't have a lot of exact matches for that search for birch wood (given the exact dimensions) so the engine broadens the search criteria automatically. You never want to just show exact matches, so long as they are ranked near the top over fuzzier matches. People often assume the search is bad if they see a lot of broader matches, without realizing that there might not be many perfect matches for the exact query given.

Returning things that are fundamentally incompatible with the search (like different dimensions than being searched) is actually worse than useless, as it clutters up everything and makes me spend more mental time and effort seeing if you have something in stock.

Which sucks.

HD search has been basically useless to me in the past for this exact reason. If I’m searching for a 3/8 lag bolt, returning results for 1/4 and 1/2 lag bolts mixed in with random 3/8 lag bolts are literally worse than just showing me 1 lag bolt result.

There's no indication it's doing this on purpose. It just looks broken and confusing. There also doesn't appear to be a way to tell it to only show exact matches. The obvious place would be the refinement sidebar, but dimensions are absent.

edit: for comparison, have a look at B&H's search where you can get so specific that it only shows one result

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/products/laptops/ci/18818/N/4...

>You never want to just show exact matches

I am not sure how well this holds up when searching a product catalog. I would believe it for a general purpose search engine, but for a product catalog, I am searching for a very specific thing.

Qualifying keywords on a product catalog are likely more common. Compare the searches for "'2' x '4' birch plywood" vs "birch plywood" and you can see why exact matching can be prefered, as it's very easy for the user to generalize their search.

> It does semantic matching.

Matching the semantics of "it's wood and it's for building and it has a 2 in it" isn't very useful when you have something that's absolutely not semantic, like a specific size definition that's an industry standard, and not really interchangeable.

It's like searching for a 3/4" socket and getting a list of 1/4", because there's a four in each. It's not helpful. It's completely useless and makes the search results look incompetent. Put those in "related searches", with a divider or different background color, or something to separate the "right" from "obviously wrong".

The search experience for wood and sockets should be driven by usefulness, not broad SEO advertising rules of thumb where things are fuzzy.

I agree that it looks confusing, when you combine those two.

What you can do is to show the best matches on top, and add other results, which are not an exact match, but visually separate them ("You might also like these..").

That is how we usually do it. You can use this approach also when recommending visually similar products to the one you searched for.

There's definitely better ways of doing this. Like the idea is good, but it is very confusing when it happens automatically. A simple UX fix might be to show the relevant results, and then have a spacer with message like "we didn't find a lot of good matches, but maybe these will be useful".

Immediately a lot less frustrating and confusing.

The advantage of a computer and flexible web page designs are to make search results easy to view and understand. In the 2'x4' piece of birch plywood example above, I saw a mix of results and only items 2 & 3 on the first row and item 2 on the second row matched what I expected. I stopped looking at the results after the second row.

"People often assume the search is bad if they see a lot of broader matches". Yes, because it usually is. Non-matching results should always be indicated separately and secondarily from perfect matches.

"...without realizing that there might not be many perfect matches...". Um, I can decide if zero or more perfect matches are good enough for me. If I am looking for a specific item, related results are almost never wanted and are a waste of time. On the other hand, if I don't have something exact in mind, then browsing is OK (since I'm choosing to go broad -> narrow).

If you are old enough, remember searching for a particular word in a printed dictionary? If I didn't find the word I wanted (ie an exact search), then I knew that my spelling (ie my exact search term) was wrong. At that point I could be be finished or I could choose to do more searching. With a printed dictionary I could laboriously expand the search using alternate spellings or synonyms (ie a fuzzy search). The exact match is required for crossword puzzles. The fuzzy search is good when writing poetry and articles.

A while ago I was researching and pricing generators. I had a set of specific parameters in mind and my friend's generator that I was using at the time to compare against. Home Depot's website was partially helpful. It gave me a good overview of what Home Depot has to offer. But, there were far too many extra results and I couldn't tell if my specific item would be included without wasting a lot of time scrolling around. After a little bit of scrolling I moved on to other sites. I didn't buy a generator from Home Depot. During my searches at other sites I stopped as soon as I got an exact match.

In my generator search, the broad results were OK to get a general idea of generator price ranges for the type I wanted. It was too time consuming when I had an exact generator I wanted to compare against and couldn't limit the search. Now that I am writing this, I can honestly say I have never used Home Depot's website again.

I read the article. If I could specify some kind of specificity or weighting to control the amount of vectorization (is that the right way to say this?), I'd think this was good news. This article just confirmed I won't bother to try. Reading the article just makes the Home Depot's website sound like another Amazon search site.

If you install NoScript and then enable javascript on only the Home Depot domains (as opposed to the ~17 or so surveillance domains), the site works much better. No great, of course. But much better.

FWIW McMaster and Digikey are themselves the exceptions. I've never seen a good parametric search engine anywhere else - they all compensate by leaning on product popularity (read: profitability), and you can never be sure it's actually surfaced all of the relevant results. I usually end up searching by one or two basic keywords, then linearly iterating through a few pages of results.

@tbran, curious what your initial search text was. Was it "2'x4' piece of birch plywood"? That returns relevant results in the top row for me, though I admit, it also returns two not-quite-relevant items in the first slots.

Full disclosure: I work in THD Online Search.

I'm not quite sure what it was, it was maybe 3-4 weeks ago. I think part of the problem is that different searches return different results:

"2x4 birch plywood" returns the correct results in the first two slots - 2'x4' birch plywood in 1/2" and 3/4".

"2'x4' birch plywood" returns those two correct results above in the 3rd/4th positions as you noted. As a customer, this is a signal that I need to be real good at searching on HD's website and start thinking up clever permutations for my searches.

Also, IIRC, at the time it also returned 2"x4" lumber either at or near the top of the results. Well, if I put "plywood" in the search string, I expect plywood, not results for every length of 2"x4" lumber that HD carries. I was pretty irritated at the time and I'm actually surprised that "2x4 birch plywood" even appears in the top row of the results.

I've stopped shopping at Home Depot and now always go to Lowe's, due to Home Depots inability to track and pack their own stock, in their app/website.

There's no way to know if something actually exists in the store, before driving there. If you call, they look at the app and say yes. If you ask for help finding where the pile of "40 in store, aisle 12, bay 15" is, they look at the app and say it's out of stock, where you can sometimes then go find it a few aisles away, but almost always not. I've wasted so many hours, with so much frustration walking around those damn aisles.

I ordered some items from them I couldn't find in my local stores. One of them was sent from a store but it was an older model different from the one I had ordered from the site. It turns out they reuse the same SKU when products are updated. Phone support refuses to provide customer service for anything delivered from a store so I had to go back and exchange it for the proper model. Except that the price had risen since I placed my order and the drone at the customer disservice desk insisted that I had to pay the difference. I had to argue with them to do what they were supposed to do with printouts from the web site showing their foolishness.

Never use the Home Depot site to buy anything.

I’m on my second home remodel and spend a lot of time at HomeDepot. I generally avoid searching via their website or app and just use either DDG/google with the “site:homedepot.com” search operator. I get way more reliable results that way.

And at my local stores the available quantity shown on the website is rarely accurate. Fairly frustrating experience to show up when the app lists “20 in stock” and there isn’t anything there.

>And at my local stores the available quantity shown on the website is rarely accurate. Fairly frustrating experience to show up when the app lists “20 in stock” and there isn’t anything there.

Seen the same and now I draw an arbitrary line - if they have less than 10, you're taking a chance - don't bet your project on it. If they have less than 5, you can almost guarantee they don't actually have it. If they have 10+, you can often find them, but they've not been unpacked or stocked on shelves yet. Usually an associate can locate them up high on the shelves and if you really need it and ask nice, they'll often get it down for you if they aren't otherwise busy*

*I wouldn't expect this to work on a Saturday at 11AM, though.

I think the problem is the vendors loading different information into whatever platform they use. I’ve seen it at other retailers and customer support said the vendors load all the info, in my case she said they entered it wrong.