Pretty much every major shopping website has terrible search functionality.

I usually want something very specific, for example 60w dimmable e12 frosted warm led bulb. I have not found a single shopping website that won’t show me results without many of these terms in the description. I don’t want to see listings that say 40w and don’t say 60w anywhere, and it isn’t hard to filter them out!

Are these shopping websites bad on purpose? What’s in it for them?

  • Kazumara
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    Because we humans are very bad at putting in an accurate search such as: name:“60w” and description:“standby”.

    I actually really like to do that. These days that only seems to work for flights and hentai though.

    Maybe if it was more available and people were taught to use it it could be a little more popular. I think fundamentally it’s not such a foreign concept to say that you want specific things from specific categories. People do that kind of thinking routinely when searching for homes or cars.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      Oh I don’t disagree. When I worked in this stuff we usually snuck in that if you put in valid search query syntax (I think it was all Lucene based) then it got used as is. Was nice for us devs to debug shit.

      Of course, anything else for used for a weighted fuzzy everything search, and the customers were always take happy with that (customers being the store owners). 🤷