This bugs me so much. It happens constantly. A few days back I searched for a person's name, put it in quotes and I got results with celebrity with somewhat similar name. Zero hits on the person I searched for on the front page. I had to add specifics to the query such as job title to find them.
An easy way to see how a "search engine" has become "vague recommendation engine" is to take a distinctive phrase from one of its results, put it in quotes, and see if it manages to find that page again. Often, it doesn't.
that's an excellent verifiable test! I've been struggling to articulate the behavior too, advertisements and slanted search results have effectively gotten in-between my information retrieval and being steered to products and services. It's so hard to find what I'm looking for a times I often just give up and move onto something else.
Amazon Search is now nearly completely useless for any kind of targeted search. Heaven help you if you're looking for a product without a certain attribute most other products like it all have. There is quite literally no way to filter results against one attribute. Even if Amazon has that product, you won't be able to find it.
I eventually just scripted a separate search engine query that's site specific to Amazon. It works but not as well as it could because it doesn't have access to my purchase history or Amazon's hidden granular category taxonomy.
Oh my god I ran into this yesterday. I wanted a very specific kind of underarmour sweat pants. It gave me every other company competing with underarmour and a bunch of things that are not sweat pants. It’s like they’re not even trying to do “search” any more, but instead just feed your search string into their ad auction system and give you the results. There’s just no way to actually get a specific thing.
I've slammed headfirst into this wall of infuriating frustration dozens of times. Just trying to find a particular kind of LED bulb that has the feature of being dimmable. Any attempt at searching for that term returns all of the bulbs which helpfully mention "Not Dimmable". And there's no way to exclude that string.
It's maddening because Amazon used to have a modern, reasonably capable search function. You could require terms. You could exclude terms. Terms could be phrases. I'm sure they still have all these capabilities, they've just decided to intentionally disable them because their A/B testing indicated that breaking their search would return a fractional percent more revenue by shoveling more unrelated results in front customers. It must work on someone but it's never worked even once on me, because I KNOW what I need and I'm only going to buy exactly that - if I can fucking find it.
I'd actually be okay to let Amazon annoy the NPCs who just clickety-click and buy whatever random shiny shit they shovel in front of them, IF they'd just add something for us technically-minded, engineering type people who are looking for one precise thing only. They can even hide it behind an arcane interface like REGEX. That'll keep the rabble out! :-)
It really feels as though Amazon's greatest fear is the idea that you might search for something and get no results. If we show you BS you explicitly said you aren't looking for then we're giving up the opportunity of tricking you into buying it anyways.
A bit ago I was searching for toothpaste that doesn't have mint in it. This is already a pain at a brick retailer, but I figured Amazon's huge product variety would help. Turns out their search is actively malicious to negative terms because otherwise I could buy just the one thing and be done with my shopping.
I should probably set up a similar homebrew search to get around this. Purchase history is far less important to me because I don't buy much from Amazon.
I'm not sure if this is just amazon japan or what, but amazon japan will not only show you things that you didn't search for, it will actively rewrite your search query into a query for those things to gaslight you into thinking you typed it in wrong. And if you try to change the text back it replace it again!
On top of all the other insane choices they made, like removing your search category restrictions if it thinks your query was too precise. I'm close to snapping.
