Comment by monkeybutton
4 years ago
I was looking for a specific person recently and searched: <name of person> Canada
I guess they were pretty obscure so Google in all their wisdom displayed the results for Canada, with the entire name struck through. Fantastic. Defaulting to the most generic term in a query to the point of absolute uselessness.
I’ve always found “lemming” ridiculous, especially in all software that copied Google despite not being generalist. “We’ve seen you are searching for ‘Phillips screw 24x17’, I won’t tell you that we don’t have any but here are results for ‘Screwdrivers’, just in case you want to use a screwdriver instead of a screw. Also here are a few Phillips TVs, in case this might help you fix your car.”
Product search on websites for traditional brick and mortar stores is the worst for this. I guess they weren't born with the challenge of "if customers can't find the product they want, you will die" that online-only businesses have, but still, it's not like online shopping is a new thing. And people might like to know if the store even has what they need before heading out!
Amazon is terrible for this. Their search is practically useless.
Yep, same thing happening to me... three keywords to define what i need, and it randomly chooses to ignore one of them, and show me irrelevant results.
The only worse search is probably on aliexpress, where you search for "red led", get a bunch of red LEDs, then you sort by the number of orders, and the top results are for other random "red" stuff (it seems as if it searches every keyword separately, but I haven't verified it).
I once managed to get Google to strike through every keyword and show me just vaguely related things.
I can confirm, it must be the worst possible one (but to be honest it is not like Amazon's one is much better).
Of course not what a search should do, but I find the aliexpress search results a good source for fun and learning, through their "random" results I discovered many things I didn't know existed.
Just today I wondered how many people have first name Mickey and middle name Mouse. I couldn't find anything - it just goes to generic Disney websites.