Some of the products aren't that bad (most are at least better than these sorts of results would spit out when it first started, years ago), but the prices are also at the same not-too-cheap, not pricey moderate price-point as the (of course I know many of those brands are not American but I know how they fit) known brands. Whoever is coding language parsing at Amazon.com must be really challenged by the brands; I get that; but there has to be a way to make it less stressful to shop. Maybe Bezos is just secretly trying to get us all to buy clothes where we don't buy food and books. Ha.
But yes, the language and sorting models being used by Amazon suck.
Unfortunately for them, I’d rather buy cheep Chinese crap from a local retailer where there is still a human buyer in the loop choosing something that’s not the lowest bottom of the barrel junk.
When I worked there a long time ago I spoke to the search team about moving more towards a New Egg style filtering model. When I’m looking for something there’s often very specific features I want. Now they’ve decided to go in the complete opposite direction and it doesn’t matter what type, they’ll show me the items they think I want. I’ve bought more than a few wrong things due to this. Returns must not factor into whatever fees they’re making off everything else.
If I'm buying a curtain rod, the MUDLRHK brand is effectively indistinguishable from a "name brand" or house brand. They're basically all coming from the same factories in China anyways - a outside of maybe Costco, there's not a human buyer exercising that much oversight at Walmart, Macys, or Kohls.
I was looking for a device that plugs into my car's 12V cigarette lighter outlet, connects with my phone's Bluetooth, outputs the audio to 3.5mm aux (my car has aux input but no Bluetooth), has no battery, automatically turns on with my car, has next and previous track buttons, and outputs USB-C with at least 30W.
Amazon's search filters were useless for this, but their LLM was able to read through reviews and suggest products that come very close. Unfortunately, no exact product exists that fulfills all the requirements.
It may be better than the uselessness of the Amazon search box, but that's a very low bar.
Not exactly, they'll show you the items they want you to buy/are paid to promote. They don't actually think you want the crap their search surfaces, at most they think they can con you into buying that stuff anyway as long as they make it difficult or impossible for you to find what you're actually looking for.
As an example of how this stacks up, in the app, I filter air fryers to be red. Easy, right? One option, two sponsored, three more options, an autoplay video ad for a non-red one, then another sponsored link, “customers frequently viewed carousel with more sponsored links, one of which is not red, (so this is a full phone screen and a half with zero real results), one more result, two sponsored links, three more results, and then a non-red deep fryer, which is not even an air fryer to begin with. How does a silver deep fryer end up in these results at all?
The shittiness continues. A sponsored link to a toaster oven (not an air fryer either), another sponsored link, a real result, a used air fryer, silicone liners (not air fryers), a carousel of “trending now” including four of five items that are not air fryers either (and a low-rated red air fryer I haven’t seen yet… which makes me think they are outright lying about it being a ‘trending’ item), another carousel with “brands related to your search”, ALSO sponsored, two more results, another near full screen autopay video ad, three sponsored links for air fryer accessories, two real results for more accessories, then two more real red air fryer results, though one is only available used.
I’m exhausted just typing that out. It’s soul-crushing. A good two-thirds of total screen real estate in any given session is just pure ads. And I typed “red air fryer”, so don’t show me a red air fryer silicone liner! That’s not what I asked for. If you must, label it in a carousel that says “matching accessories, that’s both user friendly and appropriate!
You can make it slightly more useful by changing the sort order to average rating or best selling, but for many "normie" things the bestselling will just be the crap amazon shows people by default.
I know the item is there because Google returns it, either as a search response or in their "shopping" widget. I can click through Google to Amazon and see the item, sometimes even from the certified seller. But if I enter the exact search term in Amazon's search bar it doesn't show up in their own results.
This reminds me of Instagram's search page, which is full of animated videos jumping at you to dissuade you from completing the search you wanted and just click on what they want you to see.
The last big redesign netflix made was pretty much universally hated, but they were mostly upfront about the fact that it was intended to take choice away from users and highlight the shows they wanted to promote. For a company that got where they are because people wanted "on demand" over cable TV it seems strange to hear them now saying "Choosing for yourself is so hard! Just let us tell you what to watch!" but that's the attitude every company seems to be taking.
Google needs to ban this practice because it makes their results garbage.
Losses and gains on the order of 0.5% market share may not sound like much, but at this scale it’s a vast amount of money. So being slightly more hostile needs to be offset by meaningful increases in revenue.
It's always going to come down to manipulation that prioritizes their profit over your interests. You can't afford to pay more than corporations are willing to spend to degrade the usefulness of your searches. The best you can hope for is to spend a bunch of effort to find some tiny niche alternative to google that almost no one uses and ride it out for as long as you can until enshittification sets in and you're forced to start all over again.
Today I told someone to google “school name student handbook 2026.” Only to realize I wasn’t using Google so my #1 wouldn’t be in the same place, doubled checked it showed up on Google and eventually found their link to the handbook way down the page.
“Ops, sorry Google sucks now” isn’t going to kill a company quickly but market share is a lagging indicator. Of course some enshitificstion is simply companies responding to what the largest market segment wants so they may actually be doing the correct thing even if it doesn’t seem like it to me.
Not the largest market segment, just the segment with the most control/cash to throw around. That segment will only grow smaller and smaller as they gain more power and money. That's the whole plan. The vast majority gets screwed while a shrinking minority gets whatever they want. Making everything worse for everyone who isn't you is probably not doing the correct thing, but it can be the most profitable one. At least for a while anyway.
There’s a great number of products that I used to like that have been replaced and that’s fine as a consumer but stock holders are generally better off when the stock is still valuable in 10 years vs a slightly higher dividend today.
Constantly jumping from unstable stock to unstable stock is a great way to suddenly be down a great deal of money. Offsetting a 50% drop takes doubling your money afterwards and in that period you haven’t made anything so the next 50% drop puts you into a deeper hole.
As to too big to fail, the top of the market has a surprising amount of churn with many companies falling very far very quickly.
Instead the model that actually works is to buy companies, load up on debt, pay yourself from that, and then let the zombie crash and burn. Part of that process is goosing quarterly returns with deferred maintenance etc but the model depends on a sucker lending money rather than the market.
Meaning if Amazon takes 30% of the sale and Walmart online can only take 15% with those savings being passed on to the customer, the company is not allowed for that lower price to be on Walmart.
Came by a bookstore yesterday, went in, asked the nice lady, she recommend 3, one was a pretty good match, bought it on the spot.
It’s so easy to get lost online when you’re looking for something these days…
To do this in brick-and-mortar, you'd have to use remotely programmable price tags and detect who is looking at what, which seems doable, but then you still run into all kinds of tough questions with no good answers. If I happen to see the price tag change from $3.49 (perhaps set for the person in front of me) to $4.49 and I put that item in my cart, which price am I getting charged at the register? And did a legal sale even occur if I wasn't aware what I would be paying? I don't think it's going to work.
If I buy a lot of Scott toilet tissue, I'm happy to get a discount on Scott toilet tissue.
Though mostly, the discounts I use are already posted on the shelf, I just need to "clip" an e-coupon in the app to get it.
They do send me emails and even postal mails with coupons too, but those all go in the trash.
I never get coupons for what I actually buy, I only get coupons for things I don't buy. Those things are sometimes related, but if I wanted the other brand, I'd already be buying the other brand.
The local supermarket chain near me has more or less done away with normal low prices on the shelves. If you want anything resembling a deal, you get to deal with their shit-tier quality app plus other friction inducting time wasting crap like "clipping" digital coupons. Plus opting in to all the associated tracking the app does in order to use it.
They effective raised prices 10-20% for the entire store and then the only way to get a deal is use the app. This is only currently slight hyperbole - every month it rolls out more and more in this direction.
This way they can tell regulators "we only give discounts in a discriminatory manner! We don't raise prices!" when the time comes.
With any luck a judge will see right through that unmitigated bullshit, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
I refused to get their card and stopped shopping there.
Don't expect discounts on what you buy often. They know they have you hooked on those already and they'll drive up the price on those items (for you) the minute they can. They'll give discounts on brands you don't buy to entice you to switch (if those other brands pay them enough to do it). These surveillance pricing systems are not for your benefit. They aren't there to save you money. They only exist to take more of your money away from you.
They've known for a long time now that their profits will go through the roof if they can get away with it, but the fact that consumers find the practice offensive has held them back along with the cost of initial investments in things like digital price tags and facial recognition systems (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057/s41272-019-002...) but all of it is coming. The big chains have already started. By the end of this year Walmart should have digital price tags in every store. Facial recognition is spreading too (often using loss prevention as an excuse). The grocery chain Kroger announced they'll be using facial recognition to offer different prices to different people. Their digital price tags scan faces, and your track appearance and behaviors, like how long you spend looking at various products.
It'll be simple for stores to do things like charge people more when their cameras see them wearing expensive clothes, or when the data collected from their app shows that they live in rich neighborhoods or when they can use the data they collect on you in combination with information from data brokers to learn what your income level is. I fully expect things to get even weirder like stores setting higher prices for people with the wrong opinions or political views. Algorithms will be caught "accidentally" discriminating on things like skin color and gender.
There's a little bit of pushing back against that kind of things in some places, but with the massive amounts of money on the table I expect that politicians will be bribed to allow it.
> If I happen to see the price tag change from $3.49 (perhaps set for the person in front of me) to $4.49 and I put that item in my cart, which price am I getting charged at the register?
The store shelves have cameras in them. You won't see your price until the system detects you. They can even display your photo/avatar next to the price so you know that it's for you. Facial ID at the register tells them who you are when it's time to pay up. That's just for now though. Eventually it'll likely all happen in a cell phone app and you won't be able to as easily look over someone else's shoulder to see what price they're paying.
The function is to get incremental sales (and hopefully establish a pattern of repeat business) by discounting selectively to people who might not buy at all otherwise.
If you're thinking "But they should give that discount to everybody!" that's not a thing. There's not enough margin in the first place, especially at a supermarket or Walmart, that everyone could just have lower prices on everything.
My grocery store already sends me individualized paper coupons every month.
All of this is promotions. It's all just trying to get some incremental sales, and hoping that if you get an offer for free hot dog buns you'll also buy the hotdogs.
Some particularly skeevy car dealers were skewered many years ago for saying "Advertised price is less tax, title, and additional $2,000".
But they CAN get away with saying "The $8.99 burger is $11.99 unless you: - possess one of a range of sanctioned devices - have access to data services - are able to create and manage an account - are willing to opt in to whatever tracking/marketing gimmickry - can claim the "deal" in advance
Each of those steps is a funnel that opts out at least some potential customers from the deal. The 12-year-old who doesn't own a phone can't get the deal. The 85-year-old who can't operate Android can't. The person making impulse purchases and not pre-researching their meal selection misses the offer.
I feel like there's a argument for a precedent akin to "no purchase necessary to enter" for sweepstakes-- no additional purchase, software install, or commitment should be required to claim any advertised offer.
Strange how this totally worked until a few years ago. I never cut coupons or any other time wasting shenanigans, but was able to stop up on deals on the commonly used shelf-stable items I buy without even needing to signup to a loyalty program.
I understand price segmentation is a thing. But it's gotten pretty exhausting and only increasingly so.
Fast food you can simply opt out of. My health improved due to them shifting all the "deals" to the app, and doubling menu prices. Groceries are a different thing.
This isn't even a little hypothetical- bluetooth had to anonomyze the MAC address to stop this, and it still fails sometimes.
https://nypost.com/2026/04/21/business/jetblue-x-post-sparks...
I also think this hypothetical "scan to see your price" scenario is a lot worse. As things stand now, there's still a baseline price. If the shelf says $8.99 then you know that you may be able to get a better price through their loyalty program or with a coupon, but it will never be more than $8.99. In a fully dynamic pricing world where you have to scan scan to get a number at all, which is what a lot of businesses would really love to have, you'd lose that baseline. That item might ring up at $20 if the system decides I'm desperate or inattentive or just don't care. This is already possible online, of course. If it spreads to grocery stores, though, I'm going to start channelling Ned Ludd and it won't be pretty.
People only look at recommendations now, they don't look with their eyes anymore.
So now restaurants have to focus on growth hacking rather than food quality.
That's why the mantra in running restaurants has been "location, location, location".
Location was a proxy for marketing and attention, based on foot traffic. So yes it does need to be updated to be the 2026 version for what gets peoples' attention on trying your new thing.
I think almost all good restaurateurs know that. The rest, who hyper focus on food quality, are tragically doomed.
source: my parents were in the restaurant business
Keeping a restaurant open is more about managing costs than having good food; many die because of not great inventory and supply chain handling, for example.
I disagree, many many people noticed and we were irked by it, but it's extremely impractical to fight against it.
There’s a perception that those who seek knowledge and truth are somehow less happy. Ignorance, and the willingness to take the path of least resistance, can be seen as an advantage for those who would rather not look too closely. Fundamentally, perhaps the difference comes down to red pill versus blue pill, and the illusions we’re willing to accept.
What I often see, especially in the social media era, is people who are selectively curious and like to notice negative things. So they'll share lots of articles with titles like "The Amazon Tax", which I agree was interesting and informative, but they're not at all interested in e.g. "How Amazon Is Bringing Fast Delivery to Rural America" (https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/how-amazon-is-bringin...). That's more of a problem, and I think it's what drives the idea that truth-seekers are less happy.
1. We tend to believe "more power/knowledge/choices" is universally a good thing; that we are rational creatures in some sort of game theoretic landscape where we are free to optimize for our own outcomes, and extra options or information can only be to our optimization benefit.
2. We tend to believe that as moral agents, we have obligations to Good. More specifically, knowingly choosing against Good should in proportion produce Guilt.
The bind that results from (1)+(2) is distinctly Christian to me, obsessed as Christianity is with the notion of shame as a moral whip. It is an exercise in religionmaking how to structure one's psychological incentives so that solipsism is avoided while not sacrificing (1).
Are you aware of the world you live in?
I would use it to question the premise
> we should divest from companies and organisations complicit in genocide
which in reality I decided was obviously wrong the first time I heard it, many years ago. In fact, I don't think this concept of "complicity" is morally valid at all.
Certainly this world comprises many other things than the Holocaust and IBM's support of it. Perhaps your awareness is lacking if you think that is the main thing to be aware of in this world.
I don't think that's what GP was saying at all.
To me "Are you aware of the world you live in?" suggests "If you don't even know this, you don't know anything. This is the first thing anyone should know". I'm willing to learng if they meant something else, but I guess that's asking a lot.
This was, to my thinking, such a straightforward interpretation that it didn't bear making explicit; and your interpretation genuinely didn't even occur to me.
I did nothing of the sort.
I simply said that I disagree with your stated motivations for your vote.
The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.
That's a semantic distinction without a difference.
> The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.
That's more or less true: I do believe that people should BDS corporations that knowingly and willingly harm humanity (eg: aid and abet genocide); that it's not within our interests to let such things slide. And while I am biased, this doesn't feel like a particularly controversial take: it feels like I'm just spelling out basic civics. But.. this is also just like my opinion, man. You do you.
a lot is worse now, but not shopping. on amazon some very specific items may be hard to find, and the search will throw a lot of crap at you, but you're still free to refine, compare and explore. finding exactly what you need and making an informed purchase has never been easier, and you get next day delivery (most of the time) plus exceptional return/refund policy and process. not sure about picking a, b or c? order all three, keep one, return the rest. i ofc don't (usually) do that, but i could. don't know how shopping could get any better/easier?
i don't like amazon as a company, it is evil and there is a lot to criticise, but the service and the value to the customer they provided has completely transformed shopping, for the better.
ofc long gone are the times where you could walk into a shop and talk to someone who actually had a clue about what they were selling and most likely was even an expert on the matter. that isn't coming back but that happened long before amazon.
We ended up not purchasing anything due to some unknowns, but when my PM told me we'd just order what we need I told him if the price is remotely the same we should go back to the store a few blocks away because had I not spent 15 minutes chatting I would have wasted hours reading blogs/ads trying to figure out what I needed.
What's the question?
Dude, nearly everytime I'm at a shop that's what happens. Not all are top top experts, but generally they have a very good idea about their subject and perform their jobs as if they liked them.
But that's Norway, not everyone is so lucky to live here.
Urgh... kills me.
I have some ebay alerts for items for one of my hobbies (nothing at all to do with cars). Sometimes if ebay has nothing that matches my alert, I still get an email with spare car parts that I can buy.
And today I was looking for specific brand of wine for a friend on a bottle shop's website. I got 108 results, none of which were for the brand I was searching for, many of which weren't even wine either.
It's been noticed, just not put into words very often. And it's not as if anyone felt like they could do anything about it.
Years ago Amazon intentionally nerfed their own on-site search into complete uselessness. A step at a time they removed the ability to exclude a term by prefixing a '-', then they removed grouping terms into a phrase either with quote marks or plus+signs. For years these all worked well. It's no longer plausible that the reason is to serve semantic search results, they could still include synonyms lower in results while respecting exclusion and phrases but that would make what's really going on too obvious.
The real reason they nerfed their search so bad I often have to use Google with "site:amazon.com" is simply so they can serve up whatever results are most profitable which vaguely semantically match any term. This is a big profit center due to all the 'marketing programs' they push on third-party sellers. Paying for these is virtually required to get on the first page of any popular search. Amazon has a huge inventory of such listings and selling you one of those listing is more profitable for Amazon, but assuming the price is the same, less profitable for the reseller due to giving Amazon even more of their slim margin. Since playing this game has become required, it raises the ASP of all products - another Amazon tax.
Through the Bezos era and up until around ten years ago, Amazon was "good", meaning their broad strategies and policies were generally a net gain for most buyers. Things Like allowing negative reviews and no-questions returns made me a fan and allowed Amazon to destroy all its competition. Since then they've gradually A/B tested their way into, IMHO, pure evil.
For consumers, the only real net gains Amazon still provides is massive inventory and faster delivery for Prime items (although you may have noticed they are now also strategically degrading Prime delivery consistency). Everything else about Amazon is objectively worse. Products are more expensive, search is intentionally broken, the site is rife with paid placements and dark patterns. And no one can compete because as soon as a new upstart offers search that works or lower prices by not forcing all sellers into high-margin programs, Amazon will un-nerf that specific enshittification just enough until the new threat is exterminated.
You don't need warehouses or delivery drivers - you can make it place an Amazon order to the customer's address through the customer's Amazon account. (All you have to do is ignore the fact that Amazon doesn't want you to ask for other people's Amazon passwords.)
Maybe I just learned it’s ways, but I feel like I was ~satisfied with AltaVista… I think Google came to eat their lunch in part because they took search way more seriously than DEC did.
My biggest frustration with google search is that it doesn’t. Keywords that I know are on millions of pages only return a handful of results.
I thought we basically had 110-130V North American voltage and 220-240V Euro and others voltage as the actual voltage you get from the grid varies within a range.
Some probably non-LLM explanations:
https://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/why-buy-130-volt-light-bulbs
https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/14349/are-there-any-...
You can't just will arbitrary part specifications into existence. You can't declare that you need a 67.53 ohm resistor and then search for that. They only make certain values.
Its 130V rated for safety but realistically hes getting like 115
I don’t think the forest is dark (obvious financial incentives) and I don’t think we’re pre-Google (as you said, you can literally still find what you want, USING GOOGLE, even)
However that has lead to a massive drop off in quality and price/value ratio of all products. Now the brands and the knock offs are in a race to the bottom for the lowest quality product/profit ratio so there truly is no difference and no quality products below "luxury" tier exist anymore.
Even some high'ish tier brands shoes like Hoka/Ons shoes have major quality issues even though they exist at just below the "premium" price point. I had two pairs of the same Ons last year, one lasted 3 months and started falling apart the other pair is still going 1y later. I wore them roughly the same amount switching between them. I looked up online and it turns out both brands avoid long term production contracts to bank profits from the lowest bidder at expense of their own brand they built.
Ironically I'd say that this was what firmly cemented the concept. Brands truly gained their power when they separated themselves from what they produce and the name providing it. Previously, brands were tied to the quality of their items. When they separated the idea, it enabled brands to become lifestyles and cultural signifiers, which skyrocketed the profitability of being a brand rather than a producer of a good.
I think many people noticed the change. However, when semantic search first came about, it was useful and not the only option. Being able to see items similar to my search term on Amazon was analogous to browsing products in the same aisle in a physical store, which was helpful when you wanted an item from a category but haven't decided on the exact one.
The enshittifying and infuriating difference now is that the choice of using semantic search have been taken away. It is often the only option, and the definition of things that are "semantic similar" is a mile wide. I appreciate semantic search when I have good use cases for it, but please give me the option to turn it off when I don't need it.
I’ve encountered “no results” on DuckDuckGo at least half a dozen times in the last couple of months when I know there should be relevant results, and Google gives me relevant results (sigh; I think I had gone for more than a year without using !g). Most of these have been exact keyword matches.
When I came to Canada almost 30 years ago, IT-job immigrants, let alone people who've grew up in this system were already doing 'buy real estate, rent it out, profit' and their day job was just a means to finance becoming a permanent rent seeker.
Pikachu surprise face that a culture that thinks rent seeking is great ends up doing it everywhere, all of the time, including Amazon.
Assuming they were any good at it. They can’t even figure out basic product design.
You cannot have the purchase funnels you describe without better UI/UX. Amazon’s is abysmal.
Very often people leave Amazon and boycott them entirely (like I do) because the experience is so awful across the board.
I don’t believe they are “guiding” anyone to anything. Amazon only became profitable after COVID when they forced everyone to shut down so we had to use Amazon. Everyone noticed that and remembers.
You put them on a pedestal.
Ever tried to login to AWS? Login. A regular login form. They can’t do it.