Amazon Search is Frustrating
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Director of Research, Institute for Experiential AI @ Northeastern University
I am a loyal Amazon Prime customer and I have even mentioned this problem to several of my friends at Amazon, but search keeps being one of the weakest functionalities at Amazon. In the example above, the search system recognizes a key attribute of the product that I want to buy and restricts my search to "unlocked phones" (initially was cellphones and accessories). Good. However I want to know what is the cheapest vendor so I change the order from Relevance to Price. Why I get 3 cases as first results? Cases do not have the lock/unlock attribute nor "unlocked" appears in the title of the accessories. Even if the accessory vendors are spamming their descriptions with other attributes, it is very easy to learn that there is no iphone 6 for 3 US$ or that when you use the term "unlocked", I am not looking for a case. Indeed, Amazon has plenty of click data to have an amazing ranking!
I really hope that Amazon improves their ranking and filtering, but in the mean time a simple added functionality will solve my problem: please add the option of putting a minimum/maximum filtering price. Then I can say "show only items over 100 US$" and this will get rid of most of the accessories that I do not want to see. Similarly, if I have a certain budget for buying a product (a reality!), with a maximum price I will not be shown items that I cannot buy.
Founder of Octane — Helping small businesses handle big business problems.
7 年Agreed, search is a bit random, but it's the follow on that I find most annoying, such as: recommendations for things I've bought, which I would have no obvious reason to buy again or at least for not several months; and the home page becoming flooded with the things I searched for or looked at last time, washing out everything else of possible relevance.
Head of Search @ Reckitt | SEO + PPC
7 年Often get random things showing up in results, but seems more of an issue on mobile. Spamming search results is not limited to Google and is an issue on any platform that allows third party listings
I just searched Amazon for "washington post for prime members" and it gave me the correct response at top of search, but result number fine was ladies underwear with interesting writing on it
Director of Research, Institute for Experiential AI @ Northeastern University
8 年Where is the filter??
AI/ML Leader | Applied ML for Search and Recommender Systems
8 年The min/max price filter does exist. I can't see the same results you see either - perhaps due to A/B test and/or personalization. But I agree about the better ranking and better query understanding.