Have you ever noticed how bad some retailers’ online search results are? You are searching for a pretty specific thing, but the search results you get show you tons of irrelevant products. Other sites provide you with exactly what you were searching for, but display so many results that you could never review all of them.
For example, having just bought a blood pressure monitor from Amazon, MrConsumer decided to check Wayfair during their Way Day sale. So he entered “blood pressure monitor” in quotes in their search field.
Look at the results.
*MOUSE PRINT:
It spit back a 200-page list containing 9,868 results! How many were actually blood pressure monitors? It appears to be four! And when I double-checked to see if they had the brand I bought, Omron… I got 45,861 results only one of which appeared to be an Omron brand product!
More recently, Wayfair improved. Now searching for “blood pressure monitor” provides “only” 4,410 results, 10 of which were actually those devices.
By comparison, Target provided 59 results, all of which were blood pressure monitors.
Amazon and Walmart had a different problem. Amazon offered about 450 relevant results. And Walmart provided about 1,250 results, virtually all of which were blood pressure monitors. How can any human deal with whittling down so many choices?
The abundance of relevant search results at Walmart is even prevalent when searching for grocery items making shopping online far more difficult.
*MOUSE PRINT:
This whole concept of having too many choices has a name – the paradox of choice.
It is hard to say which is worse — too many irrelevant search results or too many relevant ones. What do you thnk and what has been your search and shopping experience?
It will be interesting to see how much of this is due to AI integration or could benefit/be made worse by AI integration.
It’s all about the data they use for their search algorithm, Garbage In=Garbage Out. If a retailer doesn’t care about their data cleanliness then they don’t care about their users – or hope to sell!
In a similar vein, I love how, after I buy a product, the ads I end up with want me to buy another. Like, no, I don’t need another $300 dehumidifier, thanks!
While google allows some Boolean operators, most of the online sellers do not. Complicating this is that some sellers (most notably Amazon) have intentionally made their search results fuzzy AND eliminated ‘advanced search’ (geek pun intended). Even Google seems to have somewhat eliminated Boolean quotations as exclusive. For the math geeks among us, this is frustrating.
Amazon is the worst. There are many “sponsored” ads sprinkled among the results. They are not in the same sequence as the sort request. Also when changing search criteria, sometimes half the pages “disappear”. For instance, changing from “relevant” to “price low/high”.
I’ve reduced my Amazon purchases just because of this “search frustration”.
On line searches for grocery products that result in a great diversity of products, and many that are irrelevant, greatly reduces the ability to compare unit prices even if there is a subsequent sort by unit price function. If online grocery retailers can not or will not have more accurate initial search functions, they should allow shoppers to create a sub list for sorting by unit price.
I miss the old “search within results” option that Google eliminated about ten years ago. It worked and made things simpler. That said, today I searched for a desk today. The options are too many so I simply will go to second-hand stores until I find what I want, and for less money.
When this happens to me, I go to a conventional search engine like Google or Bing and often can easily find exactly what I want to buy.
One of the reasons Amazon’s search has become so hard to navigate is because now many of the results are from 3rd party sellers overseas pushing no-name brands. Many of them are the exact same product marketed under a different brand name. There are ways to filter them out but it’s time consuming and might involve some knowledge of what major brands you’re most interested in seeing.