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JohnMakinHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I've worked for a large e-commerce company, and you're right, search is very important - to the …

I've worked for a large e-commerce company, and you're right, search is very important - to the point where effective search was one of the main focuses of the company's development. They had a clear correlation between revenue and how good/relevant the search results were, so they focused on that. Doing what seems like the complete opposite is a... choice. I don't use amazon, but I use AWS every day of my life and I see similar-ish decisions made there in the console UI (although admittedly it has gotten a little better) - like, why are you seemingly making this purposely difficult? There's no way this benefits you.

Original discussionBut what if I want a faster horse?609 source comments · at import
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PB
pbhjpbhjHN

I've long wondered why Amazon made it harder to buy products from them, why they've decreased the [customer] value of their search, decreased the value of the filters, decreased the value of the reviews... I mean the answer has to be "they make more money this way" but for me it's means I groan internally before going to Amazon because finding the product I want will be almost impossible - it's even hard if I already visited and already found what I wanted to buy, finding it again, near impossible. Not even basics like search by product manufacturer actually work. Sites with usable search are a relative joy.

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toss1HN

>> search is very important - to the point where effective search was one of the main focuses of the company's development. THIS is what I really do not get. Of course N=[small_numbers_somewhat_selective], but I have never encountered anyone who wanted anything other than good search. I have only ever heard complaints about the messy Amazon-style searches. In decades I have NEVER heard or seen a written comment about someone finding something great that 'just popped up' in an otherwise failed search. No one likes sloppy search or finds it anything but a waste of time and actually drives them away from the site. Yet, clearly the search-enshittifiers have some data or usage pattern information indicating it works for them, or they wouldn't keep doing it. Does anyone know what this data might be? I also don't know why they couldn't do both. Present the sloppy-search but have a small button …

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htrpHN

> console UI (although admittedly it has gotten a little better) - like, why are you seemingly making this purposely difficult? There's no way this benefits you. My secret suspicion is that AWS wants everyone to use APIs and deliberately enshittify's the console

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