Re: OT: Search tricks?

On 8/22/2024 5:42 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 21/08/2024 20:57, Don Y wrote:

Is there some secret handshake to coerce *etail* sites to pay closer attention
to your search criteria?  It seems like they produce results that match ANY
of your terms instead of ALL.  So, you scroll through page after page of
"no, not that".  Likely because they hope you will "settle" for something else
they are offering -- instead of abandoning the site in favor of another
vendor.

 Some are better than others. I prefer those with filters that let you choose maker, price range and whatever parameters really matter.

Yes.  One *thinks* they have actually extracted those from the items
in their database (and not just a "filter veneer" applied to item descriptions)

My current strategy is to specify only and exactly what I know to be
a faithful description of the item (e.g., by reading it off the package!)
and, look through the results until I encounter the first item that
doesn't match all of my search terms -- figuring anything after this is
just wishful thinking on their part.

 Some sites own search facilities are so dire (BBC for instance) that the only way to find stuff is to go into google and use +BBC together with +keywords (this may work for some badly indexed etail sites too).

The site then has to have been index-able by google/DDG/etc.
SWMBO continually complains that the "art supply" sites she
uses have atrocious search capabilities (coupled with completely
outdated inventory information)

Amazon seems to have got worse in this respect. Abe books better...

Abe is reasonable good -- but, they only have to deal with book titles.
Amazon perpetually tries to sneak completely unrelated items (often
from your prior search history) into the results ("Hey, remember
THIS?  Maybe you'd like to buy it today??")
It can't be easy to design an *effective* search tool as one has to
"understand" what the search is looking for to overcome spelling
errors, different terminologies, etc.
*Or*, have the items in the DBMS previously "tagged" -- and well!

Has anyone else found a better scheme?  Quoting arguments?  etc.

 In quotes preceded by + or - to include or exclude terms works on some.