Comment by stillpointlab
16 hours ago
The dark pattern I've noticed a few times is the exact match I type into Amazon search doesn't even return the item I entered but 2 or 3 entire pages of alternatives.
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.
Search is just there to show amazon what you want so that they can show you what they want you to buy instead. Companies want everything to be push instead of pull. They don't want you to be able to choose what you buy, they want to push whatever they want (or are paid to push) at you to buy, and you're just expected to take what little you're offered, thank them for it, and be grateful.
> Companies want everything to be push instead of pull.
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.
Social media sites are full of this. They want to decide what you see or don't see instead of just showing you what your friends post in chronological order. Streaming services are another good example. They don't want to give you an A-Z listing of what's on offer. They want to show you a small selection of titles, repeated over and over across a bunch of vague/meaningless categories.
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.
Or every social media (especially Instagram)'s home page which shows the most engagement-baiting videos of this week and nothing from the people you follow
Yes, this is a horrible practice. Not just Amazon… most major e-commerce platforms set up fake pages for products they don’t offer to try to get you to the products they actually do.
Google needs to ban this practice because it makes their results garbage.
Google used to explicitly ban this and the very similar practise of keyword stuffing - they even delisted some high profile company sites (BMW is one that I remember) over those practices. They stopped caring about that sort of thing quite some time ago, and right now as they are in danger of losing what little most they have as people move to AI solutions where they are not the leader that they have historically been in the more traditional search space, I doubt it'll be any sort of priority for them in the foreseeable future.
Google doesn't care about you. If you have to close one website that is infested with Google's ads/tracking because it doesn't actually have the product what you want and you're forced to search for another website that's also infested with Google's ads/tracking that's much better for Google's bottom line. That's what Google cares about.
Until you stop using google search, which I and many other people I know have done.
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.
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Is that the "Amazon Tax"? I thought the Amazon tax was their goofiness practice of taking a very large % of all sales in their site, and banning companies from selling their same goods for less on any competitor site.
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.
Amazon's AI search doesn't do that, however. For that reason, 90% of my searches are now prompts to the AI, instead of regular searches. But it occassionally freezes the app.
Interesting. I always click through to the regular search instead of waiting for the AI results to load, under the assumption that they'll be even worse (somehow) than normal search. Maybe I should give it a try.
It was rebranded as "Alexa for Shopping"; that is what I am referring to.