Comment by didgetmaster
9 days ago
If I search on many shopping sites, the more specifics I give, the broader the results become.
It's as if every term gets translated down to a sql statement where each part of the query statement is a bunch of OR clauses instead of AND clauses.
That's probably more or less what's happening. If the site is doing full-text search, and there are no exact matches, adding more terms is going to generate more and more partial matches. Some kind of re-ranker might be able to make sense of them but those are difficult to get good results out of, probably rarely employed by a run-of-the-mill commerce site, and might be drowned out by competing objectives (sponsored results, ranking by likelihood of purchase, etc.)
This is so ridiculous and so true.
it's even worse because the searches and even sidebar checkboxes don't let you filter OUT things.
It reminds me of the article about supermarkets who periodically rearrange the entire store to bump sales (to the distress of customers)