After finding one nylon waffle fork, I wanted to search to see whether there were any better choices I would prefer to buy. I think someone hacked the Amazon deep learning algorithm… ;-)

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Eugene Crosser November 03, 2015 04:19

“Better show them arbitrary junk than admit that we don’t have the thing they want”

Perhaps it makes sense.

Michael K Johnson November 03, 2015 05:52

+Eugene Crosser It was on Amazon that I found one nylon waffle fork; I was looking to see whether Amazon had other waffle forks that I would prefer.

I looked at the T-shirts from the web interface (the mobile interface is somewhat limited), and the word “waffle” appears in the name of one of the “sponsored products related to this item” but “nylon” and “fork” are completely absent as far as I can tell.

Also funny is that on the web interface, unlike the mobile interface, it does eventually find the “OXO Good Grips Nylon Fork” that I ordered, but that’s annotated as a bad match because “-nylon- waffle fork” — even though “nylon” is in the name, it is marked as not matching; “waffle” matches only a sponsored link.

So not only is amazon’s search not finding search terms in the names of products, it is finding terms in sponsored links.

Oops.

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