Apple hires top Amazon search exec to take over Siri Apple has reportedly nicked top Amazon exec and search maestro William Stasior to head up its Siri division. Adam Cheyer, who co-founded Siri before it was slurped by Apple in 2008, and CEO Dag Kittlaus both left the company in the last two years, leaving an empty spot at the helm. Stasior will step in to run the fruity firm's …
Amazon's search engine is terrible!
You select 'Only Prime' and it shows you a load of other stuff.
You type in a very specific search query and it shows you a load of other stuff.
You select 'price from low to high' and the prices are all over the place.
How is this supposed to improve Siri?
And another problem is that if you sort by anything other than relevance, you find all sorts of things that you're clearly not after, because they show up in the same search results. Most often happens when sorting by price low->high, because you then get all of the cheap accessories. If I want to shop for hard drives, that doesn't mean I want to wade through 10 pages of cheap cables and cases, even if they are for hard disks.
Not sure why "company hires someone" is newsworthy though. Another Apple press release masquerading as news.
I worked out why the low to high price ordering is crap, it's because it's not based on the Amazon price, or even the primary partner price, it's based on the lowest price of any seller.
That includes new and used.
Some of which have low prices, but extortionate postage costs (it's another way of reducing the consumers rights of return) or the used items are less than half the price of something new, but still the search puts them ahead of the others.
So there's logic there, it's not particularly useful logic, it could do with some additional options (like including the P&P in the price and excluding used items)
I do agree that Amazon search isn't the best there is available, it's not the worst though at least it works to a degree, some searches just don't work at all.
Amazon's searxch does exactly what they want. They're like any other shop in that they don't want you to find exactly what you want on a generic search. You need to see other things so you buy them too.
But if you search for something specific it finds it straight away and the auto suggest picks the right category options to filter it down. It's not that hard to use if you use it right.
I suspect this is more about his experience heading up the huge infrastructure required to support search at a firm like Amazon. Which Apple has and perhaps needs help with for their huge infrastructure supporting Siri and iCloud.
Claiming this hire means Apple is going into search is like that hiring an exec from Citibank would mean Apple was planning on becoming a bank.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
