It has become impossible to find certain products on Amazon unless I know the exact name of it already, instead it will show me multiple pages of garbage that does not even belong to the same category. Often times Amazon will refuse to show me the product I am looking for, going as far as not even list it in the 3-4 pages of results, as if it did not exist. Then I go and enter the exact name and suddenly it shows up, but even then it is often not even among the first results...
This is the single worst thing about Amazon (aside from the knockoffs); Every time I want to buy something, I do a search and all I get is 200 pages of the same shitty product with some generic brand name like "teksolv". Somewhere in that 200 pages is a product I want. So I go to another online retailer and buy it there.
Edit: the Brand filter would work, except if there are more than five or six brands it dumps you in a huge directory of brands that you can't search, and you can only select one at a time. It's been that way for like ten fucking years! The only thing that would explain such incompetence is some kind of dark pattern.
Maybe this is working for the masses but I HATE searching for things to buy on Amazon. Last time I tried, the results pages are overwhelmed with sometimes literally hundreds of the exact same product sold by gibberish seller names. Ratings were obviously useless (the same product will have thousands of 5 star reviews by one seller, 10s of more mixed reviews on others).
Maybe it's better now but I can't remember the last time I tried to find something on Amazon because of this.
The worst thing for me is how the Amazon search algorithm seems to want to show you everything but the item you searched for.
In many categories, even when explicitly searching for brand and model names, you’ll get dozens of off-brand substitutions and even random unrelated products appearing above it in the search results.
Occasionally I’ve even noticed products that are available for sale (if you click on a direct link or have them saved in your favorites etc), but refuse to show up in search results no matter what!
Often it’s easier to find things on Amazon using Google search than using Amazon’s search.
Arguably, it's actually Amazon's search algorithms that are to blame. Those have been known for a long time to be sub-par, now, at least since 2012 (when I worked there).
If you search for a brand name, products without that brand name anywhere should just not show up, period. (I suppose an exception is if you just don't have it, kind of like when Netflix shows "shows related to" when they don't have what you're actually looking for.)
Maybe I'm the only person who has this issue but Amazon's categorization of items, broken search filters, and poor administration of 3rd party listings makes it very difficult for me to find items that I would regularly want to buy.
I can search for something like "Vacuum Filter" and receive results from 26 departments including Baby Products. So say I go to Home & Outdoor > Vacuums & Floor Care › Vacuum Accessories › Vacuum Filters › Upright Filters. Now I want to search by brand but there's nothing available for my model when I filter the search, however I can buy a Dyson filter under the "Hoover" sorting. Then half the listings are from 3rd parties who only include a lone 120x120 pixel image, an incorrect product description (or none at all), and with 0 product reviews. Then I give up on logical searching, type in the product code and the only listing was in the Automotive department after all.
Sorry to go on a rant but I find the shopping experience on Amazon to be incredibly frustrating. I usually end up using Google or another site and even when I do find the Amazon listing I'm hesitant to buy because of the sketchiness of the listing.
I've never really understood the search results in amazon or how anyone could even browse it without knowing the exact item they are looking for. Often the results it returns only has a tenuious link to what I searched for and it just feels like a list of what they have most of in stock that they want to flog off quickly.
Amazon suffers from this a little as well to be honest. Search something and pull up a page, search again and you are in this obscure category that has like 20% of the Thing A you are interesed on Amazon because some stuff is listed in other categories. Sometimes it also doesn't seem to respect my price ceilings on search filters.
It's crazy to me that in 2023, Amazon still refuses to offer meaningful product filtering. The miscategorization of items has been written about many times, and the best explanation for why they're not fixing it is basically "people like digging through piles of trash to find the good stuff". It's an infuriating experience and these days I typically use Google to search Amazon because their basic search will many times fail to show the product when I search for the exact product name or model designation, even when they do in fact carry it. On Google it'll be the first result. Google obviously can't filter Amazon products by category, let alone other parameters, but it's just so frustrating vs using other sites like McMaster-Carr, DigiKey, etc.
Amazon's search engine is pure garbage and for a company this size, and with their status, it's quite embarrassing.
Just a quick example: I saw some nice furniture on Amazon by a brand named Rivet. Turns out this is one of their in-house brands. I wanted to know more about their other products so in one of their listing, I clicked on the brand's hyperlink, expecting to be redirected to the brand's page...
But nope, I landed on a generic search page with, among other things, metal rivet items! Truly mind boggling. So in the end, I had to use Google search to find the actual page.
All I know is it gets even worse in technical products where not just different versions, but entirely different products are bundled together equally as often. Worse is when you have what is the same product listed as 2-3 different items in the search results. Which one do you pick?
I wish there was an "Amazon Only" version of the site, with only products sold and distributed by Amazon and high quality affiliates only. Of course with comingled inventory, this is much less useful.
They may have changed it, but a few years back I did product feeds to Amazon and had to read the documentation. Basically Amazon will only search the title of the product page, nothing else.
That's why the title of the products are stupid long with everything crammed in. But yeah, you can find anything on Amazon, the site is basically broken unless you know the exact thing you want, brand, name and all.
It's not even that good at searching books anymore.
Amazons search is TERRIBLE! I'm beginning to think sites that don't just let you download the catalog and search it yourself are probably trying to hide something. Amazon being the prime example of that.
Amazon's categorization system is entirely broken. It's quite sad that on of the largest companies in the world has one of the worst product filtering systems I've seen. Hell, they even remove results when sorting by price low to high, but not high to low. They're Also missing thousands of sub categories and filters. Sellers even have the free reign to deliberately mislist their items, what good that does I have no idea.
EBay suffers similar problems but is more consistent witha mostly functional sorting system.
the icab link from yesterday showed a screenshot of amazon when their categories listings were still meaningful and helpful. nowadays, it's just a pain.
i recently looked for dough scrapers. i wanted to see what's selling best and what's most rated. they are everywhere. in dessert & decoration, in utensils, in bakeware, and many other categories. i mean i get it...
it's not just search that's hard. categorization is also an issue here.
Amazon's search system is terribly broken, in many way. For example, if you try to sort by price, perhaps to find the cheapest option, then the results will be filled with random other items from completely unrelated products, no matter how exact your search is, or whether or not you are searching in one department/section or another.
Amazon’s search is terrible. If you sort by price, then the top pages of results are almost always complete garbage items that are completely unrelated to what you are looking for, no matter how specific you are. Almost like Amazon don’t want you to find the cheapest items...
What brand do you want to buy? Results: fucking ([A-Z]{5}) repeated 20 times.
Why? because the fuckers realized that if they create 100 shell companies to sell the same product they can spam the faceted search as well as the search results page with their results and exclude other sellers.
Amazon, despite having a high bar for hiring, have not dealt with this absurd problem that could be solved in 5 min with a regular expression.
I also want a filter by country of origin because I want to exclude all the countries with low reputation for safety. I am tired of products are loaded with lead, cadmium, phthalates, formaldehyde, VOCs, shit for children made of fucking PVC, and other highly toxic stuff. And if you ever try to sue those companies they will simply close it and continue to do business with one of their other 99 randomly generated companies.
The status quo is beyond stupid. Buying from Amazon is playing fucking Russian roulette.
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