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?

  • _bcron@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Most search engines suck in that regard because they eschew exclusionary results in favor of delivering a decent amount of results, even if the prompt is specifically intended to be exclusionary in nature. Even google, you can wrap three distinct words in quotes or put + in front of them or whatever, and Google will still give you results with more common spellings of those distinct words and deliver results that omit 1 or more of those words, despite you very clearly wanting those 3 exact words all in one result.

    Shopping for specific things like that, I tend to use a relevant retailer with robust filters. For example, light bulbs, I go to Home Depot, add those requirements via filter (click the box for correct base, correct size, color temperature, wattage/lumens), comparison shop the results, find a couple I want, and search the actual part number in google to find the best retailer. Seems tedious but actually cuts down on time as I’m not wading through irrelevant results (which often outnumber relevant results 10 to 1 when using a text prompt as opposed to filters)