What's Going on with Amazon Search?

The simple answer is that "Customer Obsession" is dead.

Amazon is now so dominant that improving search to help customers find what they actually want would reduce profits. The top search results are paid ads. Why distract from those with good top organic results? That just reduces the value of those ads. And those ads are big business.

Projects at Amazon are approved during the yearly OP1/OP2 planning cycle and are prioritized based on how much money the project will make. A project to fix the 'problems' has negative overall value, so it won't ever make the list.

Basically, yes - this has been a thing the last 5 years or something like that (and seemingly getting worse)...

Its gotten to a point i actively avoid buying on Amazon - however, i find the reviews still useful, if you only look at all negative ones.

If you filter by the negative reviews, there'll of course be people that have no clue how to use the product and will complain, those that complain that the packaging was damaged, a used product was received from seller x etc...

If you mentally filter out all of those - as they don't concern the product itself - you should be able to see a pattern regarding the products quality. More than 20 people out of 1000s of review complain about some switch falling apart directly after unboxing? That may be a valid complaint then...

This video parodies the issue pretty well. The names of the products are out of control.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30

As an aside - the search experience in the Amazon music app is laughably bad. The suggestion engine seems to be basically the same as retail, weighing by popularity of the search terms. But the search terms are not limited to music app, so frequently the suggestion will append words like " vinyl " or " t-shirt ". Perhaps even more frustrating, top results will often be a partial match a highly popular artist / album / song even if you give an exact string match for something else that has a decent level of uniqueness or has recently been listened to.

Yes, absolutely. On one level I understand how big tech bureaucracy, politics, and layered management structures cause this to happen. Another part of me is floored, that so many brilliant people absorbed into these companies have let this happen.

Twitter and reddit have a massive opportunity here to capitalize. I know many moons ago, Twitter had re-positioned itself to have a search bar on their homepage. Not sure what happened there.

Timely that reddit has released their comment search this week. Looking forward to trying that out.

Yep, same. Especially since they've recently started ignoring the boolean " - [whatever has SEO'd the everliving shit out of my search]"

I just search a product similar to what I need, even if it's bad quality when I add it to the cart I'll get recommendations for the good ones with better price. Carefully check the comments for non-spam. Haven't had problems using this method. The search engine is optimizing to get FBA crap out of their warehouse before it rots/explodes.

I don't understand why Amazon isn't doing more about this problem. Perhaps it's because consumers would rather buy the cheap crap?

At the very least they should somehow be grouping up products with the exact same product images. It's really fun to wade through listings of light fixtures from well known manufacturers such as IBESTWIN and COLMEGUNA.

I use Google to search Amazon products. As a last resort I search by the exact product name. Amazon search has always been garbage and with 3rd party seller products flooding Amazon it was bound to get worse.

Amazon (at least in India) resembles flea market at this point; don't shop for expensive products and buy only from big brand stores.

When shopping for anything it's hard to say which is worse between Google shopping search and Amazon.

A normal Google search for a GPU gets relavent results, switching to shopping search now has crap from aliexpress and overseas, most of which don't even match the search terms (was trying to find an Rx580 8gb, googled shopping had 1 correct item, the rest were 6600 gpus..)

Meanwhile Amazon is just broken. Sorting by price doesn't, filters are broken. Tick prime shipping only still gives 3rd party results that want to charge shipping.

Amazon won't even return all the results for products they are fulfilling. I'm regularly seeing deals on bargain sites where an items page will list a cheaper option, which is also sent by Amazon... But this option isn't shown in any searches

Amazon search was broken from day 1. My experience has been that its optimized for what amazn wants you to buy vs what you actually want to buy. Not just search, the sorting and filtering is shit quality as well.

It has become so bad, it‘s ready for disruption.

Amazon, what are you doing?