Reply to post: Re: Two such patterns missed completely

The seven deadly sins of the 2010s: No, not pride, sloth, etc. The seven UI 'dark patterns' that trick you into buying stuff

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Two such patterns missed completely

I wouldn't mind those if they actually worked, but they never do.

Keywords get spammed with junk.

"Relevant" products almost without exception aren't at all. I was trying to buy a dishwasher hose thing yesterday. I needed a particular type (one that fits on a 40mm pipe and provides two 20mm host connections, with a valve to let it breathe). The "relevant" products weren't even the same thing - all kinds of nonsense. Now if they'd had, say, other sizes, that's relevant. If they'd had other types of fittings for hoses, that's relevant. Even the hose itself, that's relevant. But the other products were just completely unrelated plumbing items, nothing to do with wastes, traps, hoses or anything of the like.

I can kind of get the "this is the battery that fits this product", but they don't do that either.

And I really don't care what other people looked at / bought from there, unless it's fitting the same kind of criteria. That someone looked at a hose connector and then bought a telephone is of no use to me at all. You may as well just remove that kind of recommendation entirely. But that they went on to buy another product which does the same job, or was needed to do the same job, or a cheaper equivalent - that's relevant.

The thing that convinces me most that AI is a shed-load of junk is that Amazon, with all that server oomph behind it, all that money and expertise, all that customer following, and a huge impetus to get these things right, can't even recommend a properly related product half the time. And even if you try to search for something specific, your search is often converted to something so generic and worthless that you can't see the needle-in-the-haystack that you were after no matter how many keywords and modifiers you throw at it.

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