The first I agree with, but I'm not sure what you mean by "Sneaking in Prime".
"Fucked up search" is almost certainly not deliberate. I suspect it costs them a good deal of sales when people cannot find what they wanted to purchase. I don't think you can call that an 'dark pattern' unless it is deliberate and they are working some sort of angle.
It means they try to trick you into joining Prime, every time you make a purchase.
Case in point:
Yesterday my wife made a small purchase on Amazon. In the evening, I was checking our shared credit card statement and noticed that there were two charges from Amazon. One was for the amount of her purchase. The other was for $1.00 and said "Amazon Prime".
I went to my wife and asked her, "Did you mean to sign up for Amazon Prime?"
Her reply: "What is Amazon Prime?"
We then had to go into her Amazon account and manually cancel a service we didn't want that would have silently billed us $99 in 30 days.
Now, you could say, that perhaps my wife did not clearly read every word of every screen that was presented to her during the checkout process. But shouldn't it have been obvious? My wife literally had no idea she signed up for something that costs $99, by accident, all while making an $11 purchase.
I don't think it's possible to argue that this is an accident. Amazon clearly knows what they are doing, and it is by design.
I don't know what GP meant, but maybe Amazon is aiming for a spot where it's easy to find something that fits the bill, but hard to find the cheapest thing that fits the bill. That's generally been my experience with their search, anyway.
"Fucked up search" is almost certainly not deliberate. I suspect it costs them a good deal of sales when people cannot find what they wanted to purchase. I don't think you can call that an 'dark pattern' unless it is deliberate and they are working some sort of angle.