Re: Bit like Amazon at the moment
Are they different hits? If so, they're probably beating Amazon. My searches often go like this:
Enter search terms: Random things that don't match what I was looking for because the descriptions specify what something has but not what it can do.
Retry search terms: Some actual results pop up. Well, three things. These must be three very good things because they each appear at least four times in the results list. Sometimes this is because there are four different colors and the sellers don't understand how to use the item color selector on one product page. Sometimes, they seem to be identical including identical prices and I have no clue why they're listed multiple times. The rest of the list consists of sponsored unrelated things and refurbished items, which often are not very desirable for many of the things one might want to buy online. Often, the three possible results are all overpriced, which leads to
Sort by price: I think that, for every possible set of search terms, someone has made a product to show up first on a sorted price list. The most frequent tend to be cases or straps. If it's electronics, it can at times be components, but never the kind of component you want to have extras of. Even when there's no real need for a case for something, somebody has made one and published it on Amazon. I don't know if anyone ever buys them, but I wouldn't recommend it as I have no proof the case will actually fit the thing it's being advertised for, assuming they actually tried to advertise for a specific product rather than a class of products. So I realize that I'm just going to have to use the price filter until I am at the lower end of possible prices and see what those look like, which leads to
Price filter: I don't know what Amazon's frontend office looks like, but I know it must have someone there (I imagine it as two laughing interns) whose job it is to monitor my searches and make sure there is never a price filter option on the page when it would be useful. I've seen it on other searches where I didn't need it, but for some reason it will disappear off the page from time to time, and that always happens when I've reached sufficient frustration. I try to find the set of parameters I can append to the query string to put a filter in place, and if I can remember it, it tends to work, but often I give up around now and go elsewhere.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
