Amazon.com has long been the main go-to place for online product search, but a recent Washington Post article finds that it is no longer giving customers what they want because advertisements are muscling out the real search results:
Running a search for "cat beds," the Post found that the entire first screen of results displayed advertisements masquerading as listings rather than products arrived at because they provided the best combination of price and quality. The results included one ad that featured a dog in the picture, rather than a cat.
On the first five pages of search results, more than half of the listings were either ads or Amazon's own products. A Profitero study found that Amazon lists sponsored products on its first page of search results at a rate twice that of Walmart and four times that of Target. Other online outlets, like food delivery platforms and Google and Apple's app stores, have also started displaying ads as search results.
[...] According to a recap of a webinar published on Search Engine Journal in 2018, 70 percent of customers searching for a product on Amazon never click past the first page of results, 35 percent click on the first product featured on the search page and the first three items account for 64 percent of clicks.
Didn't Google and Amazon both promise to boost third-party sellers' visibility? Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.
Related Stories
Regulators in the EU first began probing tech giants' advertising dominance last year:
While Google's multiple antitrust cases continue to drag on here in the U.S., it looks like the search giant's starting to make a few concessions across the pond. Reuters reports that Google's parent company, Alphabet, has made an offer to European Union regulators in response to an ongoing investigation into the tech giants' adtech business: Don't fine us, and we'll let other companies place their ads on YouTube.
Alphabet has reportedly offered to allow its rival advertising technology companies to place ads beside YouTube videos in negotiations with the European Commission, rather than obligating them to use Google Ad Manager, Display & Video 360, and Google Ads to do so. [...]
Amazon has reportedly ceded ground in a similar antitrust investigation. The ecommerce company has offered to boost third-party sellers' visibility in its online marketplace and to share shopper data with them so as to avoid fines, Reuters reports. European regulators could fine Google and Amazon up to 10% of the companies' global revenue if they do conclude the tech giants engaged in anti-competitive practices.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday December 07, @09:25PM (15 children)
If the review is on the seller's website, you can bet your shiny dollar it's not impartial, because why would a merchant host reviews that hamper sales of the product eh?
If the review is on the website of a third-party for-profit, ask yourself how said company may benefit from posting fake reviews. Or how they may be in cahoots with the providers of the goods or services being reviewed.
Also, even if the website hosting the review is honest, assume the review itself is fake or astroturfing, because fake reviews cost essentially nothing to post.
In other words, unless you on a forum or in an online community you know well, where you have a reasonable expectation that people who review a product or service do so honestly, you can pretty much assume any positive reviews you read online are BS.
That's why you should always look for and read negative reviews, never positive reviews: negative reviews will tell you if the product or service is bad. Lack of negative reviews will tell you that you have a reasonable chance that the product or service may be alright. Because unless it's exceptionally good, no actual person bothers to post positive reviews.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 07, @09:39PM
The proliferation of 5.0/5 star ratings has, IMO, turned ratings into a meaningless waste of screen space.
There's the 5 star company shills, there's the 5 star distributor and reseller shills, there's the 5 star compensated reviewers, and there's the 1 star sour grapes customer who ordered an orange and was disappointed that it wasn't an apple, or that the return policy didn't cover return shipping, or whatever.
I am a compensated reviewer for (undisclosed company) and I make it a point to never give 5 stars on every single category I rate of any given product. Generally, I like the stuff I get to review (I'm
probablydefinitely profiled and they probably only send me stuff they think I'm going to like...) but, if everything always gets 5 stars, where's the information in that signal? And, I confess, when I'm feeling like giving 3 stars instead of 4, I might be a bit swayed by the thought: are they going to keep compensating me to review cool stuff if I give mostly bad reviews? Nevertheless, when a product "earns" 2 or 1 stars, that's what my review gives it.In a perfect world, there would be transparency about who is doing the reviews, what their average review is, etc. If you look at my Google Guide reviews, you'd find a 4.something star average - which I sincerely hopes adds weight to the 1 star reviews I give when I've got some sour grapes to air out about a place.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 07, @09:44PM (2 children)
>negative reviews will tell you if the product or service is bad.
Or, if competitors' shills have been incentivized to go around spreading bad reviews...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday December 08, @04:41PM (1 child)
I'm aware of that. That's why I look for substantiated bad reviews, such as "The driver for X, Y or Z can't be installed. I tried version 1, 2 and 3 and all of them will give you a segfault in all versions of Windows I've tried it on. Don't waste your time on this product." I dismiss reviews such as "This stuff is crap. Don't buy."
Also, I'd rather be fooled into not buying than fooled into buying. It's cheaper.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 08, @05:41PM
It's a tough job, as an Amazon employee said elsewhere on this post: Amazon actually wants their customers to be happy (cynical annotation mine): because there are only 8 billion marks in this world and Amazon needs repeat customers to continue to grow.
They are collecting review faster than any reasonably sized review reading staff can keep up with. It would be nice if they had a better review quality moderating system, meta-moderation of moderators to de-weight moderation from moderators who act like shills, etc. etc.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 07, @10:53PM (9 children)
So: I currently work at Amazon on the exact systems you're talking about (the money was much better than my other offers), and I can't say too many of the details without breaking my NDA, but I can say with absolute confidence that we aren't adding fake reviews, nor do we want to do so. And we make an effort to stop third-party sellers from being able to put in fake reviews as well. Also, there's a bunch of people who are better at the math than me looking at how to use the information we get about how orders worked out to get the reviews and ratings and such to be more accurate, precise, and useful so that you're more likely to order stuff from a seller that's going to give you exactly what you wanted.
The reason for this, even if you (correctly) assume my employer is a money-grubbing megacorp who would screw over their customers if they thought it was profitable, is that if somebody buys something from a schlock company, and it's a scam, then we have to deal with the returns and chargebacks and such, and that's a bunch of hassle and costs. The way Amazon makes the most money on physical goods is if you buy a bunch of stuff, you get it quickly and it's all exactly what you wanted, so you're happy, and you come back and buy more stuff. Which means that's what I and others I work with are trying to make happen.
And yes, I and the people I work with also are trying to follow regulations, at least the ones we're told about from the lawyers.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 08, @12:15AM (7 children)
Yesterday, I received an invitation from Amazon to join their "Amazon Vine" project. I can promise, it's not because I buy a lot of Amazon stuff, but because I leave reviews of the things I buy. My reviews are always my own, personal, honest opinion. It the item is a POS, I state it, pretty plainly. If it's the best thing since man discovered sex, I'll state that.
So, if I join Vine, they'll ship stuff to me, free, in exchange for my review or the product.
I'm thinking hard about it. Haven't really made my mind up yet.
Free stuff is hard to resist, and they aren't asking me to write good reviews for junk. At least that hasn't become apparent yet.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, @12:47AM (2 children)
A complaint about Vine is a version of what JoeMerchant alluded to above, that they don't have to tell you to write positive reviews, but that you'll feel pressure, whether real or not, to write good reviews under the fear that the free stuff will stop coming. I appreciate that Vine reviews are marked, but I'm guilty of feeling negatively about them and I typically ignore them.
I abhor video reviews because I look at the reviewers as being driven by narcissism and are trying to be "wannabe influencers." Again, it is probably unfair to use such a wide brush, but I'm also not going to spend minutes watching you tell me something that I could have read in seconds (this is a much larger complaint I have about looking stuff up online, where everyone these days wants to make a YouTube video to increase their hit counts when a simple paragraph would have been sufficient to get the info across.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday December 08, @01:52AM
This is annoying in any circumstance, whether it is a review or a "help" video. First you get 1-3 minutes of intro to what the video producer usually does (often padded by lame music), then a period of explaining what the problem is (which you of course already know), and then a useless period concentrating on an answer that usually isn't any better than your average Microsoft help file. I'm blessed with a fairly fast reading rate, had the "answer" been typed out in text I could have determined in seconds whether it would be useful or not.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by EvilSS on Thursday December 08, @02:13AM
(Score: 4, Informative) by EvilSS on Thursday December 08, @02:07AM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 08, @01:51PM
Good advice, thank you! I've learned almost as much in five minutes from the subreddit, as I've learned in 1 1/2 hours on Amazon's Vine pages!
Unfortunately, there is a supply side shortage of moderations points, so you get no up-mods today! :^)
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 08, @03:27AM
Go for it. I am a reviewer in a similar program for a chain I am not supposed to name. Nothing to lose - at least in my program, they ask if you want to review a thing and you have to answer yes before they send it. The only "stress" is that once they have sent it they tend to nag about posting the review (which can be done in just about as long as it takes to test the product). That and, in my program maybe not vine, sometimes the products take a loooong time to arrive.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday December 08, @08:13PM
I already have to do fairly complex taxes with an accountant so it's not a biggie to me. But if I filed my own taxes I'd have to seriously ponder if I wanted to continue getting stuff from Vine, like if it's worth the paperwork.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, @02:12AM
Why don't you all create a "point of view" system? Then you can shop using a "white urban fit grandma's point of view" (not labelled like that of course!) and buy suitable gifts for grandma, then shop for your 9 year old niece and that all won't make your own search results and product recommendations look weird. After all just because I buy some plush toys doesn't mean I want to keep seeing ads for My Little Pony related stuff for months.
In many cases there's no "best product in the world", and different groups of people will have different preferences. Do some data mining and figure out the different groups. Then if a customer's personal group seems to match a certain group for a particular product category you can use that group and weight the search results accordingly. Then if the customer wants to "Shop for someone else", let them click on that option and maybe have them answer a few questions (then you can also do datamining from there); then you can show results based on the selected group.
Famous people may choose to make a public "product endorsement group/view" (get paid for that), buy and/or review products accordingly and the usual suckers can see what those people supposedly buy. Of course their private group could be different.
In my experienced a lot of this personalized ad stuff is primitive shit - not because it's tracking me. But because it gets it wrong. For example I've been seeing lots of watch ads on Facebook and laughing at them and making comments like they look like overpriced fidget spinners. So these advertisers are paying money to show ads to me and I doubt they'll sell more because I see their ads. They might even sell more if their ad doesn't get shown to people like me.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, @01:45AM
Really? I look for the funny Amazon reviews, positive and negative:
https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-suspiciously-specific-amazon-reviews/ [boredpanda.com]
See also: https://www.amazon.com/ask/questions/Tx2N47N5EENVMMY/ref=ask_dp_dpmw_al_hza [amazon.com]
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday December 07, @09:28PM (1 child)
most people are quite trusting and quite lazy
the online platforms rely on these characteristics.
How should society deal with gullibility?
Education would help- but that is true for everything (medicine, vaccines, climate, weather...)
On the other hand, snake oil peddlers and multinational leeches deserve to rip people off, don't they?
Caveat emptor!
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday December 07, @09:48PM
That is a core point of law [wikipedia.org]. I mean, if they're required to say "not recognized by the herpetological drug administration" on the bottle, maybe that's a good start.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday December 07, @09:42PM (1 child)
i bet Google AdWords watched a lot of youtube videos on cats sleeping in beds [youtu.be] and was able to make multiple cognitive jumps to beds so good that cats will steal them. Or maybe it matched the search to advertisements suggesting you buy a dog and a bed at the same time for maximum cat satisfaction.
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 07, @09:52PM
I'm going to go for: Dog bed sellers paid for their products to appear in response to searches for "cat bed."
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Interesting) by dx3bydt3 on Wednesday December 07, @11:26PM (3 children)
Amazon product searches turn up what they want you to buy, for whatever reason. not what you're actually searching for.
Recently I bought a generator, not from amazon though. I did compare listings there however.
If I searched my actual criteria: "dual fuel, electric start generator" I got results, all in the ~$2k range pricing, for several pages, and most of the results weren't dual fuel or electric start, just recoil gas generators.
So, after finding some specific models from specific manufacturers and searching these part#s on amazon, lo and behold lots of reasonably priced results matching my actual criteria.
In my case the quoted price from a local seller beat out the amazon listings, but such isn't always the case. Do try searching the specific product if you can find it, it might save you some cash.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by epitaxial on Thursday December 08, @12:40AM (2 children)
That's how I buy car parts. Search for part numbers on Rock Auto and cross reference to Amazon.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fliptop on Thursday December 08, @01:38AM (1 child)
I stopped buying car parts online b/c I found about 20% of the time they ship you the wrong part and it's a big hassle (not to mention the downtime) returning or exchanging (or having to ship back a core). I have a good relationship and tier 1 business account at my local Napa and it always works out better. With the business account the prices are generally comparable.
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, @03:43AM
No mod points (like nearly everyone today?) but I'd give you a +1. While I buy very simple car accessories online (example--fuzzy shoulder belt pads), anything of any substance comes from NAPA or other local parts store where I can see what I'm getting at the counter. A small price premium is fine by me compared to the hassle and wasted time when I get the wrong part.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday December 08, @12:15AM
We've seen this story time and time again. It applies to both reviews and search. Twitter trends has the same problem. Initially any review/search/trend system provides useful information until it gets gamed by actors seeking to advertise or promote. Yelp infamously had this problem with competitors dumping on eachother and/or owners of businesses promoting themselves. They cut down some of the low-hanging fruit on it, but I doubt they've solved it entirely. The question for me is, "Does any real solution exist, or can we model this problem to prove that no solution exists?"
It's above my level, but at least I think I've got the right question for the right people.
Can we even come up with a way to accurately measure corruption of search results? We may never get the number to zero, but at least it would be helpful to know that site A is 87% corrupt and site B is 35% corrupt... until somebody offers site B a big wad of cash, and when the next report comes out site B is 87% corrupt like magic.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 08, @12:21AM (5 children)
Who sees advertising on the internet? I've remarked in the past, that I see almost no ads. Nope, I don't see ads on Amazon, either. All I see when I do a search, are products of varying quality, and varying prices. And, varying relevance. Amazon needs a "search within results" function. I often get near misses in my searches, scroll through 2, 3, 4 pages, and don't find anything that appeals. I need to refine my search, within the search results, but I can't find such a function.
But, advertising. Block ad servers, to start with. Amazon has their own ad servers, just block them!
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=block+amazon+ad+servers&t=vivaldi&atb=v314-1&ia=web [duckduckgo.com]
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, @12:52AM (4 children)
The ads they're talking about here aren't the ones served up on an ad server, they are returned as part of the search results. Go read the WaPo article if you can because it shows very nicely what search results look like now, and what they looked like in 2015. Most of the first two or three pages now are sponsored content or links to Amazon's own house brand, and then dress them up with deceptive phrases like "Top Rated in your Results", not "Top Rated".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, @03:46AM (1 child)
Did anyone else wonder how this article (which disses Amazon) got published in the WaPo, which is owned by Bezos?
All seems very odd to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, @12:42PM
Despite a popular opinion espoused by a certain former "politician," Bezos lets the WaPo make its own decisions.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 08, @02:39PM
Hmmm. Okay, I guess Amazon is sneaking ads in where they don't belong. Reading the article, I found
That is something I do. I'll start searching for something on DuckDuckGo, then Google, then Ebay, and if I move on to Amazon, I already know almost exactly what I'm looking for. I scan results, and grade them as more or less relevant, then I usually click "sort by price low to high".
What I don't see, are the tattle-tale signs highlighted in the article, like "Highly rated", "Sponsored", etc.
I do see a "frequently bought together" box beneath the item I click on, but I've gotten used to the idea that those are ads, and they are worthless. The same is mostly true of places like Home Depot.
Maybe Amazon has me marked for targeted advertising? "This asshole never clicks ads, there's no point in showing him ads!"
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 08, @02:48PM
Oh - a followup. Immediately after posting above, I did a search on blocking Amazon ads. https://adlock.com/blog/how-to-block-amazon-ads-around-the-web/ [adlock.com]
I followed the link to https://www.amazon.com/adprefs/ [amazon.com] and the page wouldn't load. I double checked the link and it appears to be what I intended to see.
So, I went to Amazon.com, and clicked the link for ad preferences. Again, the page won't load. My best guess is, blocking s.amazon-adsystem.com is going to kill Amazon advertising on your machine. I can't reach that page in any of my browsers. I should try from a different machine, but I'm too lazy to move my butt to the other room . . .
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Thursday December 08, @12:39AM (2 children)
The search has always been garbage on Amazon. Pages and pages of unrelated items to a specific item searched for. This has been my experience any time I have ever used it. The only way to get a good result on it is to search on the model number of the item you want even then the garbage shows up. If not for the cheapest price and the free shipping I would never buy anything on it, as it is since the price gouging BS of the last little bit I have determined not to buy anything unless it is absolutely needed, fuck the thieving parasite corporations they will not get my business unless I need to replace broken item. Even then since I usually have back up of my important items already bought at reasonable price as I am cheap SOB they will not get my money. Almost all my food shopping is for items that are on sale everything else too really, they are not going to get rich off of me. Be nice if the majority of people would join in the effort, the slimy bastards just might have to lower the prices and stop the stealing. Anyways my rant for the day is over, now get off my lawn...
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Thursday December 08, @06:58PM (1 child)
(Fixed bad speeling in Subject)
It's like their search box uses the boolean OR instead of AND. Like when I searched for "furnace filters merv13 14x20" the search would have numerous hits on filters that were MERV 11 and less, wrong size, etc. Less Runaway mentioned above, they need their search to refine the search instead of giving expanded results.
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Thursday December 08, @07:00PM
LIKE Runaway mentioned. Freudian typo perhaps? ;)
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by owl on Thursday December 08, @04:17AM (2 children)
Is that really it, or did the Post reporter just finally notice that "search" on Amazon is total crap and almost all but worthless.
Search for anything and you'll get pages and pages of stuff not even in the same zipcode as the meaning of the terms being searched.
Search for a specific model number of a particular item, and if Amazon has that, it may show up near the top, and then the rest is filled out, again often with stuff not similar at all.
And it has been this way since Amazon was a small Seattle online seller of books circa 1996. The "search" feature simply has never worked well, and certainly never returned proper expected useful results.
The "other items like this" section, when it appears, and only after one has found something close to what one is looking for, are usually the only reasonably relevant items that ever show. What shows there is what I expect the "search" to return -- but given that the search has been broken since day one I don't expect Amazon to change it for the better either.
And then don't get me started on the "narrow down boxes". They might offer fluff things like "fulfilled by Amazon" and such, which do have their uses, but try to narrow down items that are different based on size or color or other normal attributes, and not one of the "narrow your search" selections will let you find stuff by size or other useful attribute.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, @12:46PM
My favorite is the enticement to bundle the order with two other items. But there is no price advantage given. Ok, so that might be sometimes useful if the other two items complement what you're purchasing, but most of the time in my experience is that they seem to have just grabbed one or two other things from your similar item list, so instead of suggesting a set of ear buds to go with the MP3 player I just put in my cart, it is suggesting I add another MP3 player to my order.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday December 08, @08:31PM
Yeah I was wondering the same thing. I recently ordered the wrong screen protector for my phone. I accept the blame for this, but here's how it happened: I searched using both the brand name of my phone and the model number, plus the suffix that says how big the phone is. The first few results were fine but after that it started showing screen protectors for different models. The reason I accept the blame for this is it was dumb of me to order it without verifying on the product page that it was for the correct phone.
I actually understand how this happened on a technical level but I'm surprised that it's 2022 and Amazon's search isn't more nuanced to avoid people ordering accessories for a product they don't have. Since this happened I've been wondering if Amazon is lazy or if I'm lazier than most that visit that site. I mean a million returns should have prompted that change, right?
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩