As the world‘s largest ecommerce site, you would expect Amazon to have a best-in-class search experience. After all, being able to easily find what you‘re looking for is critical to the online shopping process. However, as an avid Amazon shopper myself, I‘ve often found the site‘s search capabilities to be surprisingly lacking.
I know I‘m not alone in this sentiment. Do a quick search for "Why is Amazon search so bad?" and you‘ll find countless articles, Reddit threads, and social media complaints from frustrated users. For a company that is so innovative in other areas, Amazon‘s subpar search is a real head-scratcher. So why exactly does Amazon struggle with search? Let‘s dive in and take a closer look.
Sponsored Ads Everywhere
One of the most glaring issues with Amazon search is the prevalence of sponsored product listings. When you search for an item, you‘ll often see multiple sponsored results mixed in with the organic search results, sometimes taking up the entire first page of results.
While this is great for Amazon‘s bottom line (sponsored placements are a huge revenue driver), it makes for a cluttered, ad-filled search experience for users. It‘s not always clear which results are sponsored vs organic, and the sponsored results are not always relevant to what you searched for.
Here‘s an example. Let‘s say you search for "blender" on Amazon. The first few results will likely be popular, well-reviewed blenders from name brands like Ninja or Vitamix. But dispersed among those, you‘ll probably see sponsored results for things like blender bottles, blender cleaning brushes, or even completely unrelated kitchen items, depending on what advertisers have bid on the "blender" keyword.
As a user, this is immensely frustrating. You have to scroll past all these ads to find the organic results you‘re actually interested in. And even then, the results may span multiple pages. Imagine if Google loaded up its search results with this many ads – there would be an uproar! But on Amazon, it has sadly become the norm.
Incomplete and Inaccurate Listing Information
Another big factor hampering Amazon‘s search relevance is the inconsistent and often incomplete product information provided by third-party sellers. When a seller creates a product listing on Amazon, they are responsible for inputting the title, description, bullet points, images, keywords, and other metadata that Amazon‘s search engine relies on to match that product to relevant searches.
The problem is, not all sellers put in the effort to fully optimize their listings. They may use vague, keyword-stuffed titles like "Best Blender 2023 Professional Countertop Blender" instead of just the exact product name. They may leave out key specs and details in the bullet points. Or they may choose broad, generic keywords that aren‘t really relevant to the specific product.
All of this makes it much harder for Amazon‘s search engine to parse what the product actually is and when to show it in search results. As a result, you end up with odd, irrelevant results cluttering up the first few pages. You may search for a very specific item but get a jumble of sort-of-related products instead of exact matches.
It doesn‘t help that Amazon itself does not rigorously enforce consistent listing standards and allows sellers a lot of leeway in how they list their products. There‘s no real incentive for sellers to spend extra time fully optimizing listings if their poorly-done listings are showing up in search and getting sales anyway.
As a shopper, you‘re left to figure out on your own which listings actually match what you searched for and which are just junk results using the right keywords. It makes searching for something specific on Amazon a real chore.
Weak Filters and Sorting
One thing that could help is better filters and sorting options to help you refine your search, but sadly Amazon drops the ball here too. While there are usually some basic filters in the sidebar like price range, review rating, and prime shipping, the options are limited and don‘t always work well.
For example, let‘s say you‘re shopping for a new laptop. You probably care a lot about specific specs like screen size, RAM, hard drive type, processor, etc. But Amazon‘s filters may only let you select 1-2 of those things. And even if you select them, you‘ll still get results that don‘t match because of inaccurate listing info.
Sorting is also hit-or-miss. You may want to sort by newest arrivals to see the latest models, but your first page of results will still be filled with older products that happen to have "2023" in the title for search engine optimization. Or you may sort by avg. customer review, but still get 3-star rated results mixed in with 4 and 5 stars.
For its most popular categories like electronics, home goods, and clothing, Amazon could stand to provide much more robust filters and sorting to help users refine large sets of search results, like you see on other major retailer sites. But Amazon has been slow to expand such features.
So-So Search Relevance
Even when you get past the ads, the incomplete listings, and the limited filters – the actual search relevance of Amazon‘s organic results still often misses the mark compared to other major search engines and ecommerce sites.
Part of this is due to the sheer volume of products Amazon sells. With hundreds of millions of items, across every category imaginable, indexed in its search engine, it‘s an immense challenge to always surface the perfect result for every query. There‘s just more noise to cut through compared to a more specialized retailer.
But volume alone doesn‘t excuse the head-scratching results Amazon search often returns. For example, a simple search for "iPhone charger" returns almost 10,000 results, mostly from random third-party accessory brands or even totally unrelated products, with very few actual Apple-made or MFi-certified chargers on the first page.
Or a search for a specific book title may return every conceivable format and edition EXCEPT the exact one you want – even if you had the precise title, author, and format in your search query! You would think that keyword matching against titles would be straightforward.
These kinds of irrelevant results stem in part from Amazon‘s aforementioned issues with listing quality and over-dependence on broad / generic keywords. But they also suggest that Amazon‘s search relevance algorithms aren‘t as powerful or well-optimized as they should be.
Factors like sales rank, customer behavior patterns, and personalization based on your past search / purchase history also feed into product rankings. But the balance seems off kilter compared to other major search engines. You can‘t help but feel Amazon is ranking products more to maximize its own revenue rather than provide the most relevant results.
Lack of an Advanced Search Option
Another area where Amazon‘s search falls short is the lack of an advanced search interface for most product categories. If you‘re looking for a very specific item and want to narrow things down by multiple attributes, your only option is to use the limited filters in the left sidebar.
By comparison, many other online retailers offer a dedicated advanced search page where you can combine multiple search fields and criteria to really drill down to exactly what you want. But on Amazon, this is only available for a few select media categories like Books, Music, and Video. For everything else, you‘re stuck with the basic search bar and filters.
An advanced search would go a long way to improving the search experience for shoppers who know exactly what they‘re looking for and don‘t want to wade through pages of semi-relevant results. Even just making more of the product attributes / metadata fields searchable would help. But Amazon has chosen not to prioritize this.
Stale, Outdated Search UI
A final disappointment with Amazon‘s search is how stale and outdated the actual user interface is. The core search experience hasn‘t changed much in the last 10+ years, even as web design standards and user expectations have greatly evolved.
The search bar, the plain white background, the standard 16 item grid, the text-only filters – it‘s all very basic and bare bones compared to the richer search experiences offered by many other modern ecommerce sites. On mobile especially, the search interface feels cramped and clunky.
There‘s little sense of design polish or attention to the finer details of user experience like you increasingly see on other major consumer web / mobile interfaces. No advanced features like visual search, voice search, chatbots, etc. to experiment with new interaction models. Overall the Amazon search UI just feels very stuck in the past.
Now, one could argue that an overly complex or "slick" search UI isn‘t necessary for an ecommerce site. Amazon‘s main goal is to get you to the "Buy" button as quickly as possible, and maybe a basic, bare-bones UI achieves that. But in an age where consumers have higher expectations than ever for delightful digital experiences, you wish Amazon would put some real effort into modernizing its search UI.
Closing Thoughts
At the end of the day, Amazon‘s poor search experience boils down to misaligned priorities. By loading results with sponsored listings, Amazon is choosing to maximize short-term revenue over user experience and long-term customer loyalty. By maintaining low listing quality standards, Amazon is choosing seller convenience over search relevance. By keeping filters and sorting options limited, Amazon is choosing simplicity over truly helpful refinement. And by ignoring issues with its search algorithms and UI, Amazon is choosing the status quo over innovation.
As an Amazon shopper, this is hugely disappointing. We have come to expect so much from Amazon in terms of selection, convenience, and customer service. To have the actual product finding experience be so substandard feels like a real let down. It‘s the one glaringly weak spot in an otherwise stellar ecommerce machine.
The good news is that search is a solvable problem. With its vast resources and top tech talent, Amazon is certainly capable of improving its search experience if it really wanted to. But it will require a major shift in priorities and a real commitment to putting the customer experience first again. Here‘s hoping that Amazon rediscovers that focus soon – us shoppers will certainly appreciate it!
