Is Google.com even any better these days? It brings back a lot of results where the page appears to not even include the words I searched for far. I see the same thing on duckduckgo/microsoft now too.

When did searches that bring back results that don't match become the right answer? Its one thing when that happens with ads but they are doing it for pages that don't even pay them now (or at least don't declare they pay them, but it seems unlikely given the page contents).

I think as a result, Google doesn’t really care about the quality of their organic search results since on the scale Google cares about, “nobody” clicks them anyway.

There is little reason why the AI Assistant can be a summary of the exact page you want, while that page is buried 8 deep in the search results behind a bunch of spam.

It’s like an overly confident bullshitter with no shame and the memory of a fruit fly. And I’m sure many people trust it.

It has also been a long time since Google showed me any search results that weren't 100% ad-laden blogspam with wordy vague (and often incorrect) content with clickbait titles. I have basically given up on Google altogether.

phone: * that circle in whatsapp * find a freebie chatgpt proxy in telegram

web * "copilot" in ms Edge browser * https://kagi.com/fastgpt * https://grok.com/ * https://claude.ai

I find the need for a "search engine" reduced very considerably with all these "answer this question (NOW!)" options so readily available. They're the modern day "I feel lucky" button.

I wonder what employees of Google actually use. Is there a non-crappy version of Google that actually meets their needs and returns what they need?

For years I used DDG, not because it was better, but it wasn't worse and I wanted to support competition.

Then I started using Marginalia and shortly after I found Kagi.

Kagi works like Google used to do (and has a range of nice extra features) and in the very unusual situations were it doesn't work, when I posted it to the forums it was quickly acknowledged and dealt with.

Extremely refreshing to be on the customer side of a search engine the last three years instead of being some kind of livestock for Googles ad sales machine.

Why can’t Google’s algorithm determine that any page with a list of Amazon affiliate links is 99.999% low quality, low effort blogspam?

Allows you to customize results more than any I’ve used.

I've observed that developing and maintaining a database with the relevant attributes for each component is a ton of work and becomes a huge value-add for a distributor with technically inclined customers. It cannot be outsourced to manufacturers, as they have no incentive to match their schema to other manufacturers, and it cannot be outsourced to marketplace sellers, as they too lack this incentive. Both groups want their products to appear in as many searches as possible. Only the distributor wants exclusively the correct products to show up for a limited search and is in a position to enforce consistency across different marketplace listings and manufacturers.

They seem to have the assumption that their customers are actually trying to get some shit done.

So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment.

Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed.

So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".

No, Amazon shipping is not always free. It is only if you pay for Prime membership or if it's above certain price.

I've increasingly found that prices on amazon are higher than you'd pay on the manufacturers website. Sometimes much higher. It's worth checking. Some sites have been cheaper and had free shipping. The only catch is that shipping times were 3-5 weeks as opposed to the 3-14 days it would take for prime's 3 day shipping to actually show up.

Big box stores are all dying or dead.

Inflation adjusted, revenue is up 38% since late 2009.

Wal-Mart is similarly doing very well.

If you thought HD and WMT were dying, this may be a moment to reevaluate the heuristics you're using to gauge the health of retail businesses.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/home_depot_inc_hd_total_store... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/HD/home-depot/reve...

I am also capable of reading the back of the box. It’s actually much easier without having employees interrupt and hover around me.

It is tough (seemingly impossible) for the middle ground to exist in this environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04

We as an industry are seen as defined by crap/enshitification now. The world gave us good faith, cheered us on, mostly excitedly hyped us. And we picked, by small choice after small choice, this.

>one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.

This is kind of the space that Costco/Nordstrom/Apple/Best Buy/Lowes/Home Depot/Staples occupy. But even they find it tough, so more and more allow 3rd party sellers to make money off the platform, even if it lowers the brand value in the long term.

Why does this confuse you? It's the same in every single industry in the US right now.

Go ahead, try and start up a competitor to Amazon. Most likely you will just fail for normal business reasons, but if you ever even come close to being a threat, Amazon will just immense weight to steal your market out from under you. They can subsidize anything they want with AWS profits and can outspend you in any direction.

Meanwhile the DOJ will look away from obvious anti-competitive behavior because Reagan was a moron who thought regulating markets was magically bad.

Even Google ran into this with Fiber. Everywhere they went, Spectrum and Comcast just dropped prices to make Google's offer not very impressive, which is easy for them to do since they've spent decades extracting unbounded profits and paying off infrastructure investments, so their costs will be lower than any market entrant. Demonstrating like this that you COULD have significantly lowered prices but just chose not to SHOULD make people angry at you, but Americans are allergic to requiring companies actually be good for consumers.

This is the clear, obvious, trivial direction that any market operating in a capitalistic system is attempting to become. People need to stop being surprised.

If you want a competitive market, that doesn't happen naturally. You must force it.

Tbh, amazon should probably be run as a public service. We've long since passed the point where their profit incentives benefit anyone but shareholders. By about fifteen-twenty years by my estimate.

Will other retailers start treating their customers like human beings? Not a chance in hell. They'd rather let Amazon bankrupt them than do that.

If a) would be the case, they most of the time would know it and if b) would be the case, I would have seen it too and thus a).

Examples: I use Canon and Fuji gear for taking pictures, but they offer me Nikon or Sony related videos. If they would actually have some interest to optimize suggestions, they would offer me to say "I'm not interested in Nikon/Sony/whatever" … wouldn't they?

Or Amazon, offering me Sony lenses for my Fuji. Or more of Thing-X after buying some Thing-X yesterday. But I only need exactly one new Thing-X, which their stupid "AI" Rufus should know by now if their suggestion machinery didn't know it already ;-0

I aggressively nuke channels instead, and use a ublock script to hide anything with a red bar (which means I previously watched it).

Tangentially related, I typically queue multiple videos, and within the past year YouTube has started inserting new videos into my queue. It’s always one by the same person of the currently playing video, placed next in the queue, and it only gets inserted after watching the current video for some period of time.

That last part made it difficult to diagnose. It’s extremely annoying and feels like gaslighting because it’s never a video I actually have an interest in watching.

Has anyone found a way to disable this?

But it gets so much worse. I leave the "smart downloads" feature enabled in Youtube Music on my phone because sometimes it discovers and downloads some gems for me. Again and again it downloads "artists" and music genres that I went out of my way to never have to listen to. To add insult to injury it sometimes refuses to delete those playlists for hours after I click the button. One time I had to clear all the downloads just to remove that trash.

There is no "organic" explanation for this as much as I'd dig for one. This is Youtube taking money to push a product.

I have done exactly that. Some of the "mixins" are really strange, and have nothing at all to with what I'm looking for, so I have to assume that are paid keyword poisoning.

Does it? It seems to return things with my search terms just fine. What is usually the case is that there are lots of items with some of those search terms that are also popular.

I see no evidence that Amazon is trying to make its regular search worse.

With sponsored listings there's a separate issue if sellers are bidding on keywords, but that's also to be expected.

It makes sense for Amazon to show other products on product pages and in checkout (as it does). But doing it intentionally during search would seem counterproductive. The reality is just that search is hard, and people are often bad at entering search terms.

Saying that ads make things worse isn't an interesting observation. That's just the internet. It's nothing specific to search.

Obviously putting ads in search is going to worsen the overall quality of search+ads. But that's not an interesting observation to make because we all know that already. It's by definition. And it's clear Amazon is doing that to make money from the ads, again not as a "Gruen transfer" effect.

  >[It isn't "Gruen transfer" because it's an ad to make money.]

Seems more like clicking on ads is the end and Gruen transfer (via intentionally confusing ads with search results) is the means.

FTA: "The 'Transfer' part is the moment that you, as a consumer surrounded by a deliberately confusing layout, lose track of your original intentions." This still seems perfectly applicable to me?

FTA: "The last time I checked Facebook, maybe 10% of my feed was updates from friends. The rest was a combination of ads, memes, and influencer marketing videos..." So putting ads in lists where they don't belong is explicitly included in the definition, despite your attempt to exclude it.

Honestly, I feel guilty about it because I really dislike Bezos and Amazon's reputation as a terrible employer, yet they make a damn good product.

If you know of a better shopping site that delivers similar or better quality experience, please do let me know. I'll look into geizhals.at , but even for electronics, I've found Amazon better than dedicated sites like newegg because I find what I'm looking for, it is good quality and shipping times are amazing.

Perhaps it's a location issue, does Amazon have a worse service for non-US people?

From my life, if you feel like you shouldn't but still do, you should stop/check yourself. Applies to the hard things in life, but also the easy ones like not using a store.

I worked on various commerce search engines, and briefly ran Google Shopping back in the day - surprisingly hard problem !

Amazon sellers, lots of them don’t work for Amazon, right? Their incentive is to show up in searches, and the one who takes the reputation hit when they game the system and show up in the wrong search is mostly Amazon, not them. So, it would 0% surprise me if Amazon was just losing to the malicious subset of the parties being indexed, like Google is.

Not saying this is definitely the case, but it seems like a plausible alternative theory.

And, it probably won’t get better. In 2015 these companies were at the tail end of being new and interesting. In 2025 they are the slow entrenched incumbents.

No, this is by design. Amazon has no problem whatsoever in banning sellers that do things they don't like. It definitely helps Amazon to keep this state of things.

I’ve always thought it was NLP gone awry (stripping prefixes, searching in vector space instead of characters)

But maybe it’s just shitty on purpose to keep you around.

Vacplus Moisture Absorbers 6 Pack, 10.5 Oz Portable Humidity Absorber Boxes for Your Bathroom, Closet & Car, Dehumidifier with Fragrance

...which is related, no?

Only the sponsored results are not dehumidifiers when I just did a search.

Sorry for the noise.

Since inevitably someone will mention that the search results are littered with ads: yes, they are, and due to the same factor I mentioned above, it makes sense for sellers to advertise, say, power strips against the search term "surge protector." We run into a similar thing with "outdoor" rated wire. It's a term which technically means a rating for UV exposure. However, customers often use it to refer to wire that is rated for burial in the ground. So we advertise our burial rated cable against the "outdoor" search keyword. Gotta meet the customers where they are.

With the sheer number of products and the proliferation of feature or compatibility requirements buyers have to match, removing this functionality basically breaks Amazon search. Just try finding finding an LED bulb of a certain wattage that's dimmable. Every seller of non-dimmable bulbs puts the words "Not Dimmable" in their description to reduce returns. Amazon search will return all of those, with the listings I want buried somewhere in that flood - all because they've arbitrarily chosen to disable the standard, well-understood way of solving this common problem. The only solution is using an external search engine and limiting it to Amazon.com.

I do. Ads have zero positive. They lower everyone's quality of life and stuff our heads full of useless crap like brand awareness. Truly a cancer on society in every conceivable way.

However, breaking existing basic functionality like Search with the specific intention of making it harder and take longer for users to find what they want goes beyond annoying to malicious.

To me “outdoor” rated wire means has strands of tinned copper. Pure copper corrodes so much faster than jackets fail from UV damage

We use the term “solar cable” to refer to a UV resistant jacket, but we use that term half incorrectly - as solar cables have a bunch of different parameters other than just the UV

Unfortunately I think the only true solution is something like McMaster-Carr or Digikey

Maybe we’re a dog chasing its tail thinking a single universal search box is feasible, when it may simply be impossible for all users?

That whole time, I had an underlying belief that those of us in "the industry" (high tech entrepreneurial startups) were generally making the world better, whether in large ways like personal empowerment or small ways like making daily life easier, more efficient or, sometimes, even more delightful. In some sense, I felt like I was a small part of a larger march toward the kind of better future which so inspired me in the sci-fi books I read as a kid.

Over the last five years I've increasingly seen mainstream tech products and services adopting dark patterns or abusing customer's time or trust in other ways. Of course, there were always a few companies that sucked, either due to incompetence or just being unethical but most everyone agreed they were bad. But now using dark patterns, or just taking steps to actively make the product experience worse for users, is no longer an aberration or regression - it's apparently accepted as normal. High tech leaders from FAANG on down are ALL knowingly doing this shit. It's on KPIs. Teams of competent professional technologists are collecting bonuses for intentionally making their product or service worse for millions of users.

Right before I retired I actually saw this starting to happen in the company I was at. I was in meetings where some of my coworkers seriously proposed doing obviously wrong things, arguing it would boost "the metrics". Being a senior exec, I was mostly able to correct this by pointing out customer satisfaction, loyalty and confidence in our brand were the most important metrics, but it did feel 'off'. At first I dismissed it as a handful of employees with mis-calibrated values but it kept happening. Eventually, the CEO overruled me on one of these "values"-based product decisions. It really bothered me because, even though it was dressed up in polite language, it was clearly just about burning customer goodwill to boost a short-term metric. At the time, I assumed the company was just slowly losing its way. Most of my fellow execs hadn't ever shipped a 1.0 or been through winning over customers one at a time. Frankly, this change in ethos factored into my decision to retire. It's not like I expected every product decision to go my way but these weren't subjective judgements. And over the years I'd certainly made my share of product mistakes which negatively impacted customer's (oops!) but I fixed them and learned to do better. But it just felt weird (and really bad) to be doing the wrong thing on purpose. Sure, some of these things would boost metrics and revenue, at least in the short-term, but I found I couldn't get myself to stop believing the best way to increase revenue was to keep making our product experiences even better.

When I was in my late 20s and flying off to yet another trade show like Comdex, I sat next to a guy who worked for Marlboro cigarettes. It was fascinating talking with him and hearing the careful rationalizations about creating a product which obviously was bad for their customers and addictive to boot. I remember telling my coworkers at dinner that night about how weird it was to meet someone like that - and how lucky we were to be in high tech, where we got paid to build products that just kept getting better and generally helped make the world better - at least in some small way. Sure, I knew that progress would sometimes be two steps forward, one step back, but I guess I was naive to have never even imagined this future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWF74KMRq04

Tech leaned so heavy into enshitification it has become it, to the point an entire word was coined to explain what tech was turning the world around us into. Tech still thinks 'but I'm a good person/we're doing good so.... XYZ is OK' and isn't willing to even see how they actually chose to present themselves.

This is one of the largest roots of atrophy in the industry, currently. "Customers" are taken as a given, and there's no connection to them any longer. "High-Tech" is effectively now like Sears.

That's Amazon's recommender model. If you buy shoes you're like other people who buy shoes, including ones with different shoe sizes. So you may want shoes in different sizes.

My fellow Greeks know how the algorithm works:

https://scontent-lhr8-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/470673830...

And lately, even more infuriatingly, they started modifying my search terms! Like, I'll search for "hoover 2100" and some javascript will, after a second, change it to "hover 2100" and then show me completely irrelevant junk. And I go and change it back, and the javascript modifies it again! Not just showing the wrong results, but gaslighting me into thinking I had actually searched for the wrong thing, that the poor results were my fault!

This isn't dumb stuff like bad categorization, or missing search facets, or all the other low effort issues... It's like they're actively trying to prevent me from buying things!

What if your amazon search for neoprene shorts said: "there are only 3 available in your size, all only available in plaid."

What if netflix told you: "you watched all the good scifi movies"

but we could dream right?

I would love for the amazon search results to have sidebar checkboxes that had a 3-way toggle.

Like if you searched for an air purifier and one of the features was wifi. It would be great if you could leave it alone, toggle it to check it (with wifi), or toggle it again to X it (without wifi)

would be great to search for dumb tvs