A diffuse and thoroughly unscientific impression I’ve formed in the last few years is that online search algorithms have got poorer and poorer with the passage of time.
I’m well aware that choice of search terms is important, and that the use of qualifiers matters, but both of these seem to make next to no difference now.
This is as true of say - a petfood wholesaler’s webshop - as it is of Google.
It’s fucking frustrating, since, being lazy, I used to use search terms to get to things I knew exist, but couldn’t be arsed to bookmark.
These days, a highly specific search will yield literally 1000s of results - all of which, outside of 1 - 5, are all largely irrelevant, and include endless identical repetitions of the same irrelevant unwanted shit.
I guess like so much general shittyness in the wider world, someone, somewhere is making a lot of money off the back of this - the near monopoly of Amazon certainly shines brightly among them, but why would a vendor website be equally fucking useless? All that does is drive me into the arms of the competition.
tl;dr - fuck this ghey earth and its limitless cuntiness
I like how many shops default to an OR argument that you can’t change. So if you search for “brown faeces” it will show you all the brown cars it has, say, as well as the shit you actually want to buy.
I’ve been driven more than once to use Google* to find things inside enterprises which claim to have search capabilities of their own. Google is less motivated to give me what the enterprise wants than the enterprise is.
Most smaller/average size companies are shit at this.
It is set up well to start with and never maintained properly, links get broken etc.
It is astonishing how many firms don’t even look at their own website
Must admit I’m regularly astonished at how bad many websites are - funnily enough if they exist at all (fucking DECADES into the internet being A Thing), hifi and watch companies seem to be exquisitely bad at it. I can forgive it of the one-man-bands, but it’s the mid-tier players that are usually the worst by far: horrible low-res pics, too few of them, little or no data, no contact info, broken links, &c. ad naus.
Fucked-up fairly badly myself, having been pointed to a domain host who it subsequently transpired was very popular with spammers and scammers, leading to ALL sites on the domain being blacklisted - mine included. That really helped business…
All boils down to the same thing - no-one wants to pay for proper development work.
Yep watches - too, at least the stuff between “Normal People Have Heard Of It” and “Latest Hopelessly-Optimistic Kickstarter” - it’s kind of full of Feels as you time-travel back to the days of JANET and WEB 1.0 beta… And never a penny spent on updates.
Truth is these are soon-to-be-extinct Old Man interests and Old Man businesses…