Setting aside the issue of counterfeits on Amazon, this is really nice. Clear, simple, functional and allows you to explore the space not just comparison shop for a specific item.
I've long thought Amazon has terrible search and sort options for things like computer parts. Trying to buy e.g. RAM is a nightmare.
Amazon's sort just flat out doesn't work, I don't understand it, it's obviously not incompetence (and anyone can call a std lib `sort` fn on a given field anyway) so I don't understand why it's an option, why it pretends that sorting by price is something that you can do.
It's not just that it doesn't include shipping (for those which have a fee, which tends to be the cheap tack, presumably to try to catch you out) - even including shipping the order just seems all over the place. I can only assume it's paid-for rankings etc. with no indication of that to the user, but it's a crap site. As a business/seller/provider of goods it's great, and gets too much of my money, but the site really is crap.
I'm glad I'm not the only one for whom sort by price has never worked!
They also have tried to specifically promote their clothes and shoe-selling business within Amazon.com, but those have especially bad interface for figuring out price and all. For example, if there are 20 colours of jeans on the same page (e.g., it's considered the same item, just in different colour), do I really have to click to each one of them to find those that are the cheapest and/or are on sale?
And the sort never working by price is just ridiculous. I think it's been like that for years, really amazing that they've never fixed it. Never works even if you select Amazon.com as the only seller.
I was at an Amazon all-hands years ago (I haven't worked there for years) and I saw an employee ask Bezos what Amazon was going to do about the poor quality of search. Bezos brushed off the criticism and said the search team did good work.
I don't know why. Maybe he earnestly thinks it's good, or just has different priorities. But I don't expect it to get better.
I was there too when someone asked why Google seemed to always have better search results for Amazon.com than Amazon itself, and I remember he said that if you always start searching on Amazon and only fall back to Google when you don't like Amazon's results, you'll notice when Amazon has poor results and Google has good results, but not the reverse. Something of a copout perhaps, but I thought it was an astute observation.
> I wish there was a way to just download the catalog and query/search/sort it myself though.
That would be nice and not entirely without precedent, since you can download some of IMDB's catalogue (owned by Amazon since 1998.) However I suspect this feature is a vestigial remnant of IMDB's earlier days on Usenet.
The best I can figure is that Amazon sort by price is using the lowest price from any new offer, even after you've narrowed to a specific seller. It might be some grades of used as well. It's also likely that the prices are periodically refreshed for the index, not live.
I don't have any real information though, other than a confirmation that it doesn't do what I want either.
How can a site this large get away with such a basic functionality not working as any of their users would want for such a long time? Did it ever work?
I think I've noticed it not working like 5 or 6 years ago when I was shopping for shoes, if not earlier than that. Keep in mind that even without Zappos, they're in the business of selling shoes, too, and have ran some crazy promotions around shoes, too.
Have you ever tried searching for apps on the Google/Android Play store? It's a complete disaster if you're trying to find something specific that's not in the top 20 apps. Given that Search is Google's specialty my personal conclusion is that search is fundamentally broken on the Play Store on purpose.
There are so many apps released constantly since their only hope is to get into "new apps" lists which lasts probably a week or so, if they don't get enough installs then it is usually the end.
So I guess google just heavily filters, limits and shuffles apps so they are somewhat evenly distributed but it does look to end users like a buggy search that can't decide if it has the app or not returning different results for the same query.
Whatever. If I enter the name of an app verbatim at the search field, Google should put that app at least around the first page of results.
Currently, it often doesn't. I don't care much about fairness for the app distributors, but I suspect the current schema is much less fair than a good search. (The phone ecosystems are all so broken, why doesn't anybody create one that works as the user says?)
I don't know if it ever worked; it's certainly not worked for a long time. I recall thinking that amazon is very good at optimizing things, but their targets are different from mine.
They can get away with it, because we still use them, I guess.
Trying to buy any specifically-indicated item, outside possibly books, is a clusterfudge.
Amazon's particularly bad, though few retailers are much better.
An advantage of going directly to a manufacturer or B&M retailer's page is actually the reduced set of possible products. You still get irrelevant results, but vastly fewer.
Finding and buying computer parts is infinitely easier on Newegg than any B&M site, because that's what Newegg does. They have more computer parts than Amazon, not less, but they sort and filter and organize it much much better.
I think Amazon just doesn't care about people who are shopping for items with very exact specificationd in mind. It's an edge case for them. Most people go to Amazon when they want "a tv" or "a teapot".
Whenever I need something specific, I just look up "best X with Y feature review". Almost always I get an Amazon link to the type of thing I was looking for.
Amazon's goal to be the world's retailer, selling everything, creates an incentive for vendors to appear in as many search results as possible. Even if the payoff is small, it's a net positive.
For both Amazon and the shopper, most results subtract from the utility of the experience.
The incentives problem is that:
- For vendor, more hits == benefit.
- For Amazon, irrelevant search == small cost, fix == high effort.
- For shopper, irrelevant search == high cost, switching retailers == low cost
For a shopper, not being able to find what you want (or trust what you find) is a high cost.
The cost of switching to another site, or shopping mode, is low.
More to the point: it's vastly lower than the shopper being able to effectively fix Amazon's search.
This is a general principle of networks and positive- vs. negative-value members or additions.
The naive Metcalf's Law notion, that all members of a network are a net positive, is false, and even the far more useful Tilly-Odlyzko formulation (V = nlog(n)) fails to account for nodes contributing a negative cost. Since all* information imposes an attention cost, you can approximate the actual network value as:
V = n*log(n) - k*n
Where k is some cost constant.
In fact the size of the network is determined by the cost constant. The lower the constant, the larger the sustainable network size.
At some point, adding more members reduces total network value. Worse, since you have high-value and low-value contributors, and quite possibly a higher value-sensitivity of high-value members, as the network value approaches and passes the zero point, high-value members tend to defect. That's what happens as a social network tends to low-quality posts, content, and discussion.
Or a shopping market tends to counterfeit goods, mislabeled content, fraud and the like.
Just as MySpace found itself walking dead, and numerous earlier retail establishments, Amazon could find itself on the wrong side of this line and quickly.
Also: though I represent k as a constant, it's better to think of it at any given point in time as being mostly undifferentiated amongst nodes. But over time that constant might increase or decrease, whether due to the behaviour of nodes, additions or deletions in nodes, or in environmental factors.
It's also a nightmare to search for a HDD of a certain size. Other sizes of HDDs will be mixed in, no matter how you search. Same thing for TVs of a certain size.
Have there been any cases of counterfeit hard drives? I have heard of USB drives rigged to report incorrect free space, but I haven't heard of the same for hard drives.
Hard drives are a little different in that it's not something that countless chinese companies make and is mostly differentiated by brand. There are only a handful of companies that actually make hard drives and prices are all pretty similar.
Hard disks (multi-platter/multi head) can be refurbished in many cases by deactivating a head or a couple (a platter) of course re-labeling it to a lower capacity, I think it was a thing in non first-world markets.
There was a recent thread post about a counterfeit external USB hard disk, though, JFYI:
This is why you have to rely on third party services to perform advanced search and filtering.
Pangoly and PCPartPicker do that exact job with advanced filtering, eg: https://pangoly.com/en/browse/ram
> Setting aside the issue of counterfeits on Amazon, this is really nice. Clear, simple, functional and allows you to explore the space not just comparison shop for a specific item.
yea and totally broken UI on mobile. not their fault though. is it time for browsers to adopt a sensible default CSS for mobile?
I've long thought Amazon has terrible search and sort options for things like computer parts. Trying to buy e.g. RAM is a nightmare.