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This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now. Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looki

This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now. Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed. Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just purchase intent, the platform will choose what you'll buy. Powerful algorithms, subliminal design - I feel like a lamb in a dark forest full of wolves when I search on amazon, netflix, prime video .. There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results. I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999 - it would actually find the exact thing you were looking for ! You no longer had to sift through directories of links, you could just filter it.. We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now, since this is by design, not by lack of technical knowledge of how to make search work.

qurren 29d ago
Related: I've seen several local restaurants offering extremely good food come up and die simply because they could never get attention. 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.
- evereverever 29d ago
  I've seen a lot of "Thai Food Near Me" as the name of restaurants.
  - inigyou 29d ago
    What do you think would happen if they were called Current Location?
    - lesostep 29d ago
      Slightly off topic, but that would be a great name for a curry restaurant
      - 6031769 29d ago
        Or a dried-fruit retailer. IGMC.
- skeeter2020 29d ago
  This is why the long-term survivors tend to be pretty mid chains & franchises. They've got the marketing down and the food is an afterthought.
- gretch 29d ago
  This really isn't a new problem. 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
  - jrs100000 29d ago
    And its still location. Marketing will get get people to come try your food, but location gets them to come back every week.
    - inigyou 29d ago
      Location makes them try it once. Quality makes them come back every week. Which is useless if they never tried it once. On the other hand if you set up in a place where each person only comes by once or twice in a lifetime, like an airport, you don't have to make them come back and you just have to make sure the food is tolerable.
- bobthepanda 29d ago
  To be fair, restaurants have always had very high failure rates (something like 75% close within the first year.) 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.
muvlon 29d ago
This "dark forest" feeling is what has recently driven me back to brick-and-mortar stores. Of course they can and do manipulate me via ads, store layout etc. but at least the store looks the same for me as for the person before or after me. They can't algorithmically optimize the store around my behavior in particular.
- micromacrofoot 29d ago
  ah but what they can manipulate around you is the price, which is a behavior some places are trying to get ahead of https://www.nj.gov/governor/news/2026/20260723a.shtml https://www.nj.gov/governor/news/2026/20260723a.shtml
  - muvlon 29d ago
    Has that actually happened in retail stores? All I can find on the topic is about online purchases (or ordering/paying online and picking it up at the store). 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.
    - paconbork 29d ago
      "Please scan this item with our app to see the price"
      - SoftTalker 29d ago
        As of now, my local supermarkets still have price tags on the shelves. And if there's a higher price at the register when the item is scanned, they will honor the shelf price if you call it to their attention. The biggest supermarket now has e-ink shelf tags so I assume those are synced with their item database so that doesn't happen anymore.
colinrand 29d ago
>>Somehow nobody noticed. I disagree, many many people noticed and we were irked by it, but it's extremely impractical to fight against it.
- vinnymac 29d ago
  As someone who notices a lot of things, I was talking recently with someone who notices almost nothing. When I spoke about my desire to seek out the truth, they simply replied, "I just want to live a happy life." 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.
  - SpicyLemonZest 29d ago
    There's nothing wrong with being a curious or attentive person who likes to notice things. 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-bringing-fast-delivery-to-rural-america-25101174 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.
  - Defletter 29d ago
    Except that this holds true for everything. For example, I only just today found out about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8yo7_Inikg&t=1157s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8yo7_Inikg&t=1157s, ie, Oracle's apparent complicity in genocide. Now that I know this, I now have to rethink things: what am I using that depends on Oracle that I need to migrate away from? This wasn't something I was concerned about just 24 hours ago. This is not to say it's not a valid concern: we should divest from companies and organisations complicit in genocide, but this is demonstrably a case where I have given myself more work, more worry, from gaining knowledge.
jambalaya8 29d ago
Searched for jeans a few days ago. I got about 3.3% each, scattered through several dozen pages, of two American brands; 1.65% each another couple of brands; a smattering of one or two results for another couple of brands; the remaining approximately 90% were the almost exact same jeans (maybe the same), under several names... pages and pages of them. It is almost impossible to shop for clothes on Amazon now. It used to be just selecting for 1 or 2 day delivery only would trim down the chaff, although now those products are also serviced through the warehouses (and there are less options for one day or same day delivery than years ago, Prime or not). 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.
- jonhohle 29d ago
  It’s not just clothes. Unless the item is a very specific name brand thing, I find Amazon nearly useless for discovery. It’s effectively Ali Express with much higher markup and much faster shipping. I suppose there’s a market for that. 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.
  - alex43578 29d ago
    I guess for things like clothes or generic homegoods, I've seen this deluge of random China goods. But shopping for other things, like electronics, it does a really good job of surfacing what I'm actually looking for, whether that be name brand or generic. 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.
orofound 29d ago
> the platform will choose what you'll buy 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.
- iamacyborg 29d ago
  You might want to read some of their quarterly earning reports and research papers their teams submit. Your experience is not commensurate with financial reality.
mutinyy 29d ago
Yesterday I tried to buy a light bulb for my kitchen hood on Amazon. I searched for 130V 40W light bulb. I ended up buying a 120V one because I gave up trying to find the one I wanted. I think I'll run over to the hardware store next time.
- laurencerowe 29d ago
  Is there a difference between a 120V bulb and a 130V bulb? 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.
  - knollimar 29d ago
    Yeah no way theres a transformer stepping up the voltage in his hood. Its 130V rated for safety but realistically hes getting like 115
  - chrismartin 29d ago
    Yes, the 130 volt bulb lasts longer when operated on 120 volts. My family would buy these when I was kid. Some probably non-LLM explanations: https://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/why-buy-130-volt-light-bulbs https://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/why-buy-130-volt-light-bulbs https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/14349/are-there-any-other-reasons-to-use-130-volt-halogen-light-bulbs-instead-of-120-v https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/14349/are-there-any-...
    - inigyou 29d ago
      Yes, but that isn't a thing that is actually manufactured, due to the lightbulb cartel. And if it was manufactured, they'd label it as 120V, long-lasting, because no country uses 130V power. 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.
      - chrismartin 25d ago
SoftTalker 29d ago
I still sometimes get "zero results" on general DDG searches, if I'm specific enough. Never on a shopping site, though.
znort_ 29d ago
> We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now 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.
- ynac 29d ago
  Frank and earnest question about using a company when you think they aren't a net benefit to society, especially when there are other options. I too have my reasons for thinking Goog, Amzn, and others are not good. I just don't use them. The other options seem great to me - I never long for what I'm missing. Momentum, habit, peer pressure, or something else going on?
  - znort_ 29d ago
    i found that almost everything around me is evil, and after a period of hesitation i resolved to make the most of it.
    - ynac 29d ago
      That's a totally legit answer! I've heard that from quite a few friends. My personality (or something) nags me too much to do so, but I get it.
  - saxelsen 29d ago
    > Frank Nd earnest question What's the question?
wat10000 29d ago
Amazon and a lot of other big companies feel like the corporate embodiment of the "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers" line from Clerks. We are not valued customers whose business forms the foundation of their success. We are obstacles that sit between them and the money in our bank accounts. They'd prefer to cut us out of the equation entirely, but failing that, they will do whatever it takes to overcome. The fact that they don't actually want us in the equation oozes through every bit of the process.
- inigyou 29d ago
  Google will just delete all data of a 200 billion dollar pension fund without blinking. This did happen, and somehow it still has customers.
zahlman 29d ago
> Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed. 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.
mrandish 29d ago
> search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. 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.
- bluedino 29d ago
  eBay search is still pretty decent about letting you exclude things and other 'power user' search abilities
chrismorgan 29d ago
> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results. 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.
z_rho_one 29d ago
> Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed. 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.
citizenpaul 29d ago
To me its a bigger problem. The concept of Brand was highly diminished during the manufacturing outsource phase to cheap countries. You could pay $10 for the brand name of a simple product or get the 100% equivalent for $1 from a Chinese Knock off. So people felt ripped off and abandoned brands. (reasonable since the brands were keeping prices high artificially) 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.
- MSFT_Edging 29d ago
  > The concept of Brand was highly diminished during the manufacturing outsource phase 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.
  - cindyllm 29d ago
    [dead]
- jcgl 29d ago
  Yes, exactly—the concept of Brand means hardly anything anymore. Certainly due partly to outsourcing like you say, but I think even more generally due to financialization. In a financialized world, brands become purely assets, which can be swiftly created and destroyed on (digital) paper, or packaged and sold to the highest bidder. The brand’s products aren’t the product any longer—it’s the brand itself.
stillpointlab 29d 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.
- toddmorey 29d ago
  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.
  - autoexec 29d ago
    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.
    - Retric 29d ago
      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.
      - autoexec 29d ago
        Most people wont. Even those that do will probably switch to something that does the same (or worse). Alternatives are scarce. Most other search engines are using Google's search results (at least in part) behind the scenes. AI probably wont save you (Gemini sure wont). Advertisers can't wait to infest the chatbots. AI companies are expected to accept money to promote certain products or to refuse to mention a competitor's products. 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.
PKop 29d ago
Kagi is comparable to pre-semantic, no-ad Google. Because they don't have ads you just pay for the product. It's great.
- inigyou 29d ago
  "With Kagi you are the customer, not the product."
Tangurena2 29d ago
As bad as Google's searches have become, they still do a better job finding the book on Amazon when Amazon's search can't find a book when I put in the title and author's last name. It is common for "sponsored results" to include trousers when I am searching for a book.
- FishFry62 24d ago
  [dead]
whilenot-dev 29d ago
It's called the Gruen Effect[0], and everything is becoming a product of marketing. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer
alexashka 29d ago
It's been true my entire adult life. 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.
bitcurious 29d ago
> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results. 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.
- iggldiggl 28d ago
  Yeah, like for another example, I'd stumbled across some (probably somewhat obscure) blog/podcast series about Bob Dylan songs some time ago, but had forgotten to bookmark it. A few month later, I tried to find it again using the same search terms, but nothing turned up anymore (only dozens of various song lyrics pages, but not the blog I was interested in). Luckily I eventually managed to retrieve it from some older backup of my browser history…
jfreds 29d ago
Oh no a reranker which optimizes for pclick (bias to cheaper items) and profit (bid and margin) 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)
bch 29d ago
> I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999 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.
iammattmurphy 29d ago
One of the best Userscripts I ever made was for Amazon: It adds an explicit "results must include these search terms" input box as well as one to exclude results for particular terms. Saves me SO much time when I have to find something on Amazon.
- inigyou 29d ago
  Have you considered making that into your own shopping website? 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.)
mdavidn 29d ago
In the past year, I ended my Amazon Prime membership and started shopping at Target again for this reason. A few items I do still purchase on Amazon, and that has been eye-opening: Checkout is now a minefield of dark patterns, filled with buttons that would reactivate my Prime membership in one click. Is their goal to drive me away from the service?
jamesfinlayson 29d ago
> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results. 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.

qurren 29d ago

Related: I've seen several local restaurants offering extremely good food come up and die simply because they could never get attention. 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.

evereverever 29d ago
I've seen a lot of "Thai Food Near Me" as the name of restaurants.
- inigyou 29d ago
  What do you think would happen if they were called Current Location?
  - lesostep 29d ago
    Slightly off topic, but that would be a great name for a curry restaurant
    - 6031769 29d ago
      Or a dried-fruit retailer. IGMC.
skeeter2020 29d ago
This is why the long-term survivors tend to be pretty mid chains & franchises. They've got the marketing down and the food is an afterthought.
gretch 29d ago
This really isn't a new problem. 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
- jrs100000 29d ago
  And its still location. Marketing will get get people to come try your food, but location gets them to come back every week.
  - inigyou 29d ago
    Location makes them try it once. Quality makes them come back every week. Which is useless if they never tried it once. On the other hand if you set up in a place where each person only comes by once or twice in a lifetime, like an airport, you don't have to make them come back and you just have to make sure the food is tolerable.
bobthepanda 29d ago
To be fair, restaurants have always had very high failure rates (something like 75% close within the first year.) 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.

muvlon 29d ago

This "dark forest" feeling is what has recently driven me back to brick-and-mortar stores. Of course they can and do manipulate me via ads, store layout etc. but at least the store looks the same for me as for the person before or after me. They can't algorithmically optimize the store around my behavior in particular.

micromacrofoot 29d ago
ah but what they can manipulate around you is the price, which is a behavior some places are trying to get ahead of https://www.nj.gov/governor/news/2026/20260723a.shtml https://www.nj.gov/governor/news/2026/20260723a.shtml
- muvlon 29d ago
  Has that actually happened in retail stores? All I can find on the topic is about online purchases (or ordering/paying online and picking it up at the store). 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.
  - paconbork 29d ago
    "Please scan this item with our app to see the price"
    - SoftTalker 29d ago
      As of now, my local supermarkets still have price tags on the shelves. And if there's a higher price at the register when the item is scanned, they will honor the shelf price if you call it to their attention. The biggest supermarket now has e-ink shelf tags so I assume those are synced with their item database so that doesn't happen anymore.

colinrand 29d ago

>>Somehow nobody noticed. I disagree, many many people noticed and we were irked by it, but it's extremely impractical to fight against it.

vinnymac 29d ago
As someone who notices a lot of things, I was talking recently with someone who notices almost nothing. When I spoke about my desire to seek out the truth, they simply replied, "I just want to live a happy life." 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.
- SpicyLemonZest 29d ago
  There's nothing wrong with being a curious or attentive person who likes to notice things. 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-bringing-fast-delivery-to-rural-america-25101174 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.
- Defletter 29d ago
  Except that this holds true for everything. For example, I only just today found out about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8yo7_Inikg&t=1157s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8yo7_Inikg&t=1157s, ie, Oracle's apparent complicity in genocide. Now that I know this, I now have to rethink things: what am I using that depends on Oracle that I need to migrate away from? This wasn't something I was concerned about just 24 hours ago. This is not to say it's not a valid concern: we should divest from companies and organisations complicit in genocide, but this is demonstrably a case where I have given myself more work, more worry, from gaining knowledge.

jambalaya8 29d ago

Searched for jeans a few days ago. I got about 3.3% each, scattered through several dozen pages, of two American brands; 1.65% each another couple of brands; a smattering of one or two results for another couple of brands; the remaining approximately 90% were the almost exact same jeans (maybe the same), under several names... pages and pages of them. It is almost impossible to shop for clothes on Amazon now. It used to be just selecting for 1 or 2 day delivery only would trim down the chaff, although now those products are also serviced through the warehouses (and there are less options for one day or same day delivery than years ago, Prime or not). 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.

jonhohle 29d ago
It’s not just clothes. Unless the item is a very specific name brand thing, I find Amazon nearly useless for discovery. It’s effectively Ali Express with much higher markup and much faster shipping. I suppose there’s a market for that. 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.
- alex43578 29d ago
  I guess for things like clothes or generic homegoods, I've seen this deluge of random China goods. But shopping for other things, like electronics, it does a really good job of surfacing what I'm actually looking for, whether that be name brand or generic. 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.

orofound 29d ago

> the platform will choose what you'll buy 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.

iamacyborg 29d ago
You might want to read some of their quarterly earning reports and research papers their teams submit. Your experience is not commensurate with financial reality.

mutinyy 29d ago

Yesterday I tried to buy a light bulb for my kitchen hood on Amazon. I searched for 130V 40W light bulb. I ended up buying a 120V one because I gave up trying to find the one I wanted. I think I'll run over to the hardware store next time.

laurencerowe 29d ago
Is there a difference between a 120V bulb and a 130V bulb? 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.
- knollimar 29d ago
  Yeah no way theres a transformer stepping up the voltage in his hood. Its 130V rated for safety but realistically hes getting like 115
- chrismartin 29d ago
  Yes, the 130 volt bulb lasts longer when operated on 120 volts. My family would buy these when I was kid. Some probably non-LLM explanations: https://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/why-buy-130-volt-light-bulbs https://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/why-buy-130-volt-light-bulbs https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/14349/are-there-any-other-reasons-to-use-130-volt-halogen-light-bulbs-instead-of-120-v https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/14349/are-there-any-...
  - inigyou 29d ago
    Yes, but that isn't a thing that is actually manufactured, due to the lightbulb cartel. And if it was manufactured, they'd label it as 120V, long-lasting, because no country uses 130V power. 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.
    - chrismartin 25d ago

SoftTalker 29d ago

I still sometimes get "zero results" on general DDG searches, if I'm specific enough. Never on a shopping site, though.

znort_ 29d ago

> We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now 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.

ynac 29d ago
Frank and earnest question about using a company when you think they aren't a net benefit to society, especially when there are other options. I too have my reasons for thinking Goog, Amzn, and others are not good. I just don't use them. The other options seem great to me - I never long for what I'm missing. Momentum, habit, peer pressure, or something else going on?
- znort_ 29d ago
  i found that almost everything around me is evil, and after a period of hesitation i resolved to make the most of it.
  - ynac 29d ago
    That's a totally legit answer! I've heard that from quite a few friends. My personality (or something) nags me too much to do so, but I get it.
- saxelsen 29d ago
  > Frank Nd earnest question What's the question?

wat10000 29d ago

Amazon and a lot of other big companies feel like the corporate embodiment of the "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers" line from Clerks. We are not valued customers whose business forms the foundation of their success. We are obstacles that sit between them and the money in our bank accounts. They'd prefer to cut us out of the equation entirely, but failing that, they will do whatever it takes to overcome. The fact that they don't actually want us in the equation oozes through every bit of the process.

inigyou 29d ago
Google will just delete all data of a 200 billion dollar pension fund without blinking. This did happen, and somehow it still has customers.

zahlman 29d ago

> Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed. 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.

mrandish 29d ago

> search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. 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.

bluedino 29d ago
eBay search is still pretty decent about letting you exclude things and other 'power user' search abilities

chrismorgan 29d ago

> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results. 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.

z_rho_one 29d ago

> Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed. 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.

citizenpaul 29d ago

To me its a bigger problem. The concept of Brand was highly diminished during the manufacturing outsource phase to cheap countries. You could pay $10 for the brand name of a simple product or get the 100% equivalent for $1 from a Chinese Knock off. So people felt ripped off and abandoned brands. (reasonable since the brands were keeping prices high artificially) 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.

MSFT_Edging 29d ago
> The concept of Brand was highly diminished during the manufacturing outsource phase 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.
- cindyllm 29d ago
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jcgl 29d ago
Yes, exactly—the concept of Brand means hardly anything anymore. Certainly due partly to outsourcing like you say, but I think even more generally due to financialization. In a financialized world, brands become purely assets, which can be swiftly created and destroyed on (digital) paper, or packaged and sold to the highest bidder. The brand’s products aren’t the product any longer—it’s the brand itself.

stillpointlab 29d 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.

toddmorey 29d ago
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.
- autoexec 29d ago
  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.
  - Retric 29d ago
    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.
    - autoexec 29d ago
      Most people wont. Even those that do will probably switch to something that does the same (or worse). Alternatives are scarce. Most other search engines are using Google's search results (at least in part) behind the scenes. AI probably wont save you (Gemini sure wont). Advertisers can't wait to infest the chatbots. AI companies are expected to accept money to promote certain products or to refuse to mention a competitor's products. 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.

PKop 29d ago

Kagi is comparable to pre-semantic, no-ad Google. Because they don't have ads you just pay for the product. It's great.

inigyou 29d ago
"With Kagi you are the customer, not the product."

Tangurena2 29d ago

As bad as Google's searches have become, they still do a better job finding the book on Amazon when Amazon's search can't find a book when I put in the title and author's last name. It is common for "sponsored results" to include trousers when I am searching for a book.

FishFry62 24d ago
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whilenot-dev 29d ago

It's called the Gruen Effect[0], and everything is becoming a product of marketing. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer

alexashka 29d ago

It's been true my entire adult life. 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.

bitcurious 29d ago

> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results. 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.

iggldiggl 28d ago
Yeah, like for another example, I'd stumbled across some (probably somewhat obscure) blog/podcast series about Bob Dylan songs some time ago, but had forgotten to bookmark it. A few month later, I tried to find it again using the same search terms, but nothing turned up anymore (only dozens of various song lyrics pages, but not the blog I was interested in). Luckily I eventually managed to retrieve it from some older backup of my browser history…

jfreds 29d ago

Oh no a reranker which optimizes for pclick (bias to cheaper items) and profit (bid and margin) 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)

bch 29d ago

> I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999 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.

iammattmurphy 29d ago

One of the best Userscripts I ever made was for Amazon: It adds an explicit "results must include these search terms" input box as well as one to exclude results for particular terms. Saves me SO much time when I have to find something on Amazon.

inigyou 29d ago
Have you considered making that into your own shopping website? 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.)

mdavidn 29d ago

In the past year, I ended my Amazon Prime membership and started shopping at Target again for this reason. A few items I do still purchase on Amazon, and that has been eye-opening: Checkout is now a minefield of dark patterns, filled with buttons that would reactivate my Prime membership in one click. Is their goal to drive me away from the service?

jamesfinlayson 29d ago

> There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results. 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.