The Gruen Transfer is consuming the internet
sebs.website353 points by Incerto 4 days ago
353 points by Incerto 4 days ago
For me, Amazon is a prime example of this. The search is so abysmal, it shows me wrong results intermixed with the thing i am searching for - why? In the hope that i see something that interests me.
I've bought two wrong things accidentally on Amazon as a result: After searching for a surge protector, i bought a power strip that lacked a surge protector because it was among the search results and i didn't notice it.
And after searching for neoprene shorts i accidentally bought shorts that weren't made of neoprene because they also appeared among the results.
Also when searching for shoes in my size, i see prices for the shoes in other sizes. It's hilariously bad.
As a result, i avoid shopping on Amazon.
Shoutout to sites like geizhals.at that will let me filter by dozens of attributes per category to find the perfect product.
Aliexpress is just as bad as well, they have taken the Amazon model and ramped it to 11. Yet they don't seem to be intentionally mixing in bad results like Amazon is, instead because its all external sellers they are all embedding searched keywords to push their product in front of you. There are loads of shopNNNNNNNN based sellers doing this with various products that clearly don't last long. Both store designs only seem to exist due to having almost anything on them but the cost is long, complex and detail checking searches, they are minefields of wrong products.
Is Google.com even any better these days? It brings back a lot of results where the page appears to not even include the words I searched for far. I see the same thing on duckduckgo/microsoft now too.
When did searches that bring back results that don't match become the right answer? Its one thing when that happens with ads but they are doing it for pages that don't even pay them now (or at least don't declare they pay them, but it seems unlikely given the page contents).
My observation with Google is that an astonishing high percentage of their users stopped clicking organic search results around 2010 or so. They exclusively choose from amongst the top two or three ads, which they don’t even realize are ads since the indication of “what’s an ad” has gotten more and more subtle and the position of the first organic result has gotten lower and lower on the page to the point where today you generally would have to scroll a bit to find the first organic research result. The same users who only clicked the sponsored links before now don’t click any links, usually preferring to simply read the AI generated summary of some random spam results (which notably is far worse in accuracy than what you would get if you simply asked an LLM directly).
I think as a result, Google doesn’t really care about the quality of their organic search results since on the scale Google cares about, “nobody” clicks them anyway.
I like how the AI summary has had a 50% rate of directly contradicting itself between the first and last paragraphs in my recent searches.
It’s like an overly confident bullshitter with no shame and the memory of a fruit fly. And I’m sure many people trust it.
My conspiracy theory is that Google has been deliberately making its search results worse to subtly train users into engaging with ads and the AI assistant.
There is little reason why the AI Assistant can be a summary of the exact page you want, while that page is buried 8 deep in the search results behind a bunch of spam.
Google just changes and ignores your search terms and then serves you the results to whatever it wants instead.
Recently I've had Google return results lacking search terms I've put in quotes (and then clicked "Show results for xxx instead" when it tries to 'correct' me). I have no idea how I'm supposed to make my desire any clearer.
It has been a long time since double quotes worked reliably for me on Google.
It has also been a long time since Google showed me any search results that weren't 100% ad-laden blogspam with wordy vague (and often incorrect) content with clickbait titles. I have basically given up on Google altogether.
I stopped using Google at work when they forced javascript. Since then I realized that I haven't missed it at all and I've stopped using it entirely. It's become trash.
What do you use instead?
+1 for Kagi. If you want a search engine that works with you rather than against you, this is it right now.
This has been going on for over a decade for me now (I know because I blogged about it at the time).
For years I used DDG, not because it was better, but it wasn't worse and I wanted to support competition.
Then I started using Marginalia and shortly after I found Kagi.
Kagi works like Google used to do (and has a range of nice extra features) and in the very unusual situations were it doesn't work, when I posted it to the forums it was quickly acknowledged and dealt with.
Extremely refreshing to be on the customer side of a search engine the last three years instead of being some kind of livestock for Googles ad sales machine.
Googles a little better about matching exact terms if you go to search tools -> all results and change it to Verbatim
Every single search. It’s funny to me that Google doesn’t let you default this setting and a sign they they are quite anti-user.
I wonder what employees of Google actually use. Is there a non-crappy version of Google that actually meets their needs and returns what they need?
I just want a search engine that won’t return blogs with affiliate links or many results that are providing identical information.
When I click a result and see Amazon links, it’s instant back button.
Why can’t Google’s algorithm determine that any page with a list of Amazon affiliate links is 99.999% low quality, low effort blogspam?
Because those pages also make Google a lot of money via ads. "Show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome."
FWIW, Amazon's search algorithm is actually extremely simple: rankings are based on what people buy after searching for a particular term. To use your examples, the reason why Amazon is showing power strips when you search for "surge protectors" is because people often use the terms interchangeably. So, while this is bad for you, since you correctly distinguish the terms, it's actually better for people who use the terms interchangeably and do want a power strip when they search for surge protectors. And I think it's ambiguous what the correct behavior should be. Perhaps in the future some AI system will be able to help customers manage this kind of confusion, but we're not there yet.
Since inevitably someone will mention that the search results are littered with ads: yes, they are, and due to the same factor I mentioned above, it makes sense for sellers to advertise, say, power strips against the search term "surge protector." We run into a similar thing with "outdoor" rated wire. It's a term which technically means a rating for UV exposure. However, customers often use it to refer to wire that is rated for burial in the ground. So we advertise our burial rated cable against the "outdoor" search keyword. Gotta meet the customers where they are.
I have no conceptual issue with Amazon serving ads against search terms. My big issue with Amazon search is that they intentionally made it much less useful by removing any ability to group words into one term with quotes or exclude any term with minus. These were working features of Amazon search that had long been there (and are probably still there in the code).
With the sheer number of products and the proliferation of feature or compatibility requirements buyers have to match, removing this functionality basically breaks Amazon search. Just try finding finding an LED bulb of a certain wattage that's dimmable. Every seller of non-dimmable bulbs puts the words "Not Dimmable" in their description to reduce returns. Amazon search will return all of those, with the listings I want buried somewhere in that flood - all because they've arbitrarily chosen to disable the standard, well-understood way of solving this common problem. The only solution is using an external search engine and limiting it to Amazon.com.
> I have no conceptual issue with Amazon serving ads against search terms.
I do. Ads have zero positive. They lower everyone's quality of life and stuff our heads full of useless crap like brand awareness. Truly a cancer on society in every conceivable way.
I agree ads are annoying and I wish they weren't there (and for me, they're mostly not because: uBlock Origen). My point was that conceptually in-store advertising has been a thing for over a hundred years. Retailers have always merchandised their inventory.
However, breaking existing basic functionality like Search with the specific intention of making it harder and take longer for users to find what they want goes beyond annoying to malicious.
It’s funny, I sell wire
To me “outdoor” rated wire means has strands of tinned copper. Pure copper corrodes so much faster than jackets fail from UV damage
We use the term “solar cable” to refer to a UV resistant jacket, but we use that term half incorrectly - as solar cables have a bunch of different parameters other than just the UV
Unfortunately I think the only true solution is something like McMaster-Carr or Digikey
Maybe we’re a dog chasing its tail thinking a single universal search box is feasible, when it may simply be impossible for all users?
I like shopping by email at work, it’s easy. I send three people an email saying ‘How much for 60,000 feet of 18/2 shielded wet rated cable’ and they send me a quote. They quote me exactly what I’m asking for, I review the quotes and send back a PO number. I wish internet shopping was that easy!
geizhals.at is regrettably only available in Austria, Germany, and the EU, but other sites I've used with similar good parametric search and filter are digikey.com (electronics engineering), https://at.rs-online.com (more electronics engineering), and McMaster.com (industrial manufacturing).
I've observed that developing and maintaining a database with the relevant attributes for each component is a ton of work and becomes a huge value-add for a distributor with technically inclined customers. It cannot be outsourced to manufacturers, as they have no incentive to match their schema to other manufacturers, and it cannot be outsourced to marketplace sellers, as they too lack this incentive. Both groups want their products to appear in as many searches as possible. Only the distributor wants exclusively the correct products to show up for a limited search and is in a position to enforce consistency across different marketplace listings and manufacturers.
On a side note, McMaster.com is the very best online shopping site I've ever visited or used. It's blazing fast (a trick based on pre-fetching that you can observe in all its glory in the developer view of your favourite browser), it's logical, uncluttered - perfect.
This efficiency extends to their customer support ops as well. I ordered the wrong size of a bin, sent a message in their chat saying I wanted to return the bins and get the ### SKU instead, and without any further input from me, there were new bins delivered 2 days later.
They seem to have the assumption that their customers are actually trying to get some shit done.
This 100%. McMaster quietly perfected e-commerce at some point, and because we’re live in a fallen world, nobody decided to follow their lead. If only we could convince McMaster to sell toilet paper and cereal…
McMaster is expensive for certain things but if you need something very specific next day, they’re invaluable.
Having marketplace sellers do it could probably work if the moderation had teeth. But (for example) I've reported intentionally miscategorized listings on ebay only to have an automated system reject the report.
On a related note, https://segor.de/ doesn't have great search (and they don't remotely attempt to carry every component, and note that a whole lot of German component names look nothing like their English counterparts) but the technical design of their online catalog is interesting - it's a fast single-page app with about 3MB of data, so when you navigate the catalog it doesn't do any network round-trips except to fetch images.
Youtube search is similar. It shows a couple of results related to your query, then a whole bunch of irrelevant videos.
Search companies like Google reached the conclusion that search results need to be another form of infinite scrolling. They will spend little time doing real search and then flood the results with what they really want people to see.
And YouTube isn't really interested to improve their suggestions: when I say "Not interested" to a suggestion, they ask why not with two idiotic possible answers: a) I've already seen it or b) I don't like it.
If a) would be the case, they most of the time would know it and if b) would be the case, I would have seen it too and thus a).
Examples: I use Canon and Fuji gear for taking pictures, but they offer me Nikon or Sony related videos. If they would actually have some interest to optimize suggestions, they would offer me to say "I'm not interested in Nikon/Sony/whatever" … wouldn't they?
Or Amazon, offering me Sony lenses for my Fuji. Or more of Thing-X after buying some Thing-X yesterday. But I only need exactly one new Thing-X, which their stupid "AI" Rufus should know by now if their suggestion machinery didn't know it already ;-0
I’ve stopped using “not interested” because it’s so shitty and pointless. It has no effect whatsoever on the other videos YT decides to show me. I swear when I clicked “I’ve already watched this video” the Home Screen would show more previously-watched videos than before.
I aggressively nuke channels instead, and use a ublock script to hide anything with a red bar (which means I previously watched it).
Yep, the irrelevant videos are clearly targeted based on viewing history, but a completely separate topic from the search, and often with clickbait titles.
Tangentially related, I typically queue multiple videos, and within the past year YouTube has started inserting new videos into my queue. It’s always one by the same person of the currently playing video, placed next in the queue, and it only gets inserted after watching the current video for some period of time.
That last part made it difficult to diagnose. It’s extremely annoying and feels like gaslighting because it’s never a video I actually have an interest in watching.
Has anyone found a way to disable this?
The browser extension "Unhook" for YouTube gives you full customization of what content presentations display and auto play etc. Even allows to remove the home page, which is designed to distract. For phones, I recommend using your web browser instead of the app. Using your phone web browser also allows for using adblock so it's a double win minus the less usable interface
I pay for Youtube and see in the results a lot of irrelevant videos that have nothing to do with my search or viewing history.
But it gets so much worse. I leave the "smart downloads" feature enabled in Youtube Music on my phone because sometimes it discovers and downloads some gems for me. Again and again it downloads "artists" and music genres that I went out of my way to never have to listen to. To add insult to injury it sometimes refuses to delete those playlists for hours after I click the button. One time I had to clear all the downloads just to remove that trash.
There is no "organic" explanation for this as much as I'd dig for one. This is Youtube taking money to push a product.
Amazon has been pretty horrible for ages, but the thing I'm confused about is why there doesn't seem to be a serious competitor, one that has a good interface, search, and which doesn't allow 3rd party sellers that flood the offerings with low quality knockoffs, etc.
First and foremost, you have to understand why people use Amazon. Amazon has a good chance of having whatever it is I'm looking for, the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere, and the shipping (with Prime, in the US, can't speak for UK/EU/RoW) absolutely can't be beat. People don't generally feel like messing around on three or four different websites to find the item, add it to their cart, and start the checkout process to determine how long the shipping will take and how much it'll cost, so the mental heuristic of "Amazon shipping is always free and if it's the sort of thing I'd find at Walgreens it'll usually be same-day/next-day" is incredibly valuable for Amazon.
So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment.
Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed.
So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".
> the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere
I've increasingly found that prices on amazon are higher than you'd pay on the manufacturers website. Sometimes much higher. It's worth checking. Some sites have been cheaper and had free shipping. The only catch is that shipping times were 3-5 weeks as opposed to the 3-14 days it would take for prime's 3 day shipping to actually show up.
So many terrible trends are driven purely by people's over reliance on mobile phones. When you're at a personal computer, it's not terribly hard to search for the same product on multiple web stores and see which one makes the most sense, or build up a cart over a few days to hit a shipping minimum. "Fast" shipping is overstated for Amazon and overrated for most purchases - on average, with the Sunk Cost Fallacy membership, it's maybe a day or two quicker than other web stores. If you really do need something urgently then it's worth it to spend a little effort comparing who can actually get it to you the quickest. And over time you build up a regular intuition of where to shop for various types of things, and for many things independent stores have much better curation. Weighing competitive options is only hard when you've disempowered yourself by using a tiny touch screen with an attacker-owned operating system.
A few years ago I noticed that my shipments all took a week or more regardless, but other retailers would have it here in a day or two, sometimes same day. Cancelled prime and haven’t regretted it.
> "Amazon shipping is always free"
No, Amazon shipping is not always free. It is only if you pay for Prime membership or if it's above certain price.
I pay for Prime, so that's my mental heuristic. Plenty of other people are in the same boat. For those who don't pay for Prime, "free over $35" is an acceptable drop-in replacement.
Honestly? I just drive over to Best Buy now. Yeah it costs a few bucks more and I have to leave the house (this is actually a good thing), but I can be certain that the box on the shelf that says "surge protector" is actually a surge protector and I don't need to spend 15 frustrating minutes sorting through intentionally misleading trash to find it and then cross my fingers that what I order is what I actually receive.
The best buys in my area are getting kind of sketch in the past few years. Numerous empty shelves. Products sitting on the floors in boxes not put up for display. Wish I had a Microcenter close.
Microcenter’s commission scheme has made their sales people intolerable. Last time I was in there I had to tell no less than 6 employees I was perfectly comfortable choosing a router and DisplayPort cable without them.
I am also capable of reading the back of the box. It’s actually much easier without having employees interrupt and hover around me.
All the stores are like this now, not just Best Buy. Walmart used to be, as I remember it, this insane level of consumerism store where the shelves were overfilled and there was no product so niche that they didn't have at least a few of nearly any product you can imagine. They used to sell hard drives, for fuck's sake, even if it seems like they were locked behind the glass near the electronics checkout. Now you go in there, and it's just a wasteland. Home Depot no longer sells home improvement or hardware store goods... it tries to sell the cheap junk you'd think would be in the Walmart. There are no tools at Home Depot unless a contractor would use them. Absolutely nothing for woodworking (I seem to remember them carrying at least one display piece for a wood lathe back around 1999-2003), now there are no table saws. I often end up going with my wife or my daughter to Michael's or Hobby Lobby, the former has reduced their store inventory so much that the only way to hide it was to remove shelves and spread them thinner so that you could march a school band through the aisles without them having to step closer to each other. The latter has changed their inventory to have fewer craft supplies, and more Temu-style junk.
Big box stores are all dying or dead.
HD revenue is 250% ish vs what it was 15 years ago. Currently at ATH. Hard to say they're dying.
Adjusted for inflation? With how many new stores in that timeframe?
Caveat - I haven't gone to primary sources, but all indications are that they're doing pretty well. Increase of 1.8~% in number of store locations in the last 5 years.
Inflation adjusted, revenue is up 38% since late 2009.
Wal-Mart is similarly doing very well.
If you thought HD and WMT were dying, this may be a moment to reevaluate the heuristics you're using to gauge the health of retail businesses.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/home_depot_inc_hd_total_store... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/HD/home-depot/reve...
They are dying as what their namesakes suggest and instead become slop factories.