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Your Website Search Hurts My Feelings

Dec 26, 2023

I wouldn't mind this huge ad so much if the pancake mix was made with lentil flour...on second thought, that doesn't sound good:

walmart search result showing ads instead of results

And if I complain about not being able to sort by price/quality (or weight), I assume some people will point out that choice adds complexity. But it's hard to understand what value this choice is adding:

facet with a single option

Since we're talking about facets, I'm curious what category those other 632 products fall under:

category facets showing 16 total products despite having 648 results

At costco, a search for "rice" yields this amazing facet:

Each facet contains all the products

Surprise, the search returned 25 results (seriously).

I'm particularly intrigued by rice that isn't vegan, lactose free, or gluten free:

Rice facet showing only 1 vegan option

The sorting made me check wiki to see how much revenue they have ($242 billion):

Case-sensitive sorting of brands

There must be a term in information theory that describes what's going on here:

Search for 'alcohol' returns non-alcohol results

You can't tell, but the 2nd result is also alcohol free (the first 10 results are). For any Singaporean thinking that Alibaba ruined Lazada who ruined Redmart: no.

I don't think anyone would be offended if I said e-commerce in the Philippines has a lot of catching up to do. But this first page search result is something else (yes, they sell a lot of other laundry detergent):

Search for 'laundry detergent' returns umbrellas

The inspiration for this post is that nintendo.com lets you filter for 2+ players, but that includes single system, local wireless and online. So there's no way to get a list of games that supports couch coop. Unless you want to check 1680 games that is:

1680 2+ player games

Haha, J/K. The search won't return more than 1000 records.

And while we're talking about nintendo.com, if you goto Games > Nintendo Switch Games:

nintendo.com homepage top nav

You'll get 120 games and only 120 games. Of course the list of switch games isn't under Games > Nintendo Switch Games that would be silly. But, for days I've tried and failed to figure out what these 120 games have in common and why they get this special treatment. I can't sleep.