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It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up.

I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown).

Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop-shipped Chinese knockoffs now. The onsite search is almost entirely useless.



Enshittification is such a perfect word for all this. Cory Doctorow is a word magician.


There's also the less neologistic phrase "worse on purpose"


Aliexpress is also surprisingly impossible to search, you gotta use external search engines, I guess it increases there sales :S More than half the time for me on AliExpress a very specific search term will just return completely unrelated things which are either trending or related to my past purchases.


I was recently looking for a cheap IOT camera in a specific form factor from aliexpress and the results were so irrelevant I had to develop alternative strategies like finding one good result and checking under its recommendations or image searching from the one good result to see other using the same picture.




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