Comment by 0xbadcafebee

On Amazon, you used to be able to search the reviews and Q&A section via a search box. This was immensely useful. Now, that search box first routes your search to an LLM, which makes you wait 10-15 seconds while it searches for you. Then it presents its unhelpful summary, saying "some reviews said such and such", and I can finally click the button to show me the actual reviews and questions with the term I searched.

This is going to be the thing that makes me quit Amazon. If I'm missing something and there's still a way to to a direct search, please tell me.

No disagreement for the most part.

I used to be able to say search for Trek bike derailleur hanger and the first result would be what I wanted. Now I have to scroll past 5 ads to buy a new bike, one that's a broken link to a third party, and if I'm really lucky, at the bottom of page 1 will be the link to that part's page.

The shitification of the web is real.

Sounds like your laptop is wholly out of date, you need to buy the next generation of laptops on Amazon that can handle the modern SEO load. I recommend the:

LEEZWOO 15.6" Laptop - 16GB RAM 512GB SSD PC Laptop, Quad-Core N95 Processor Up to 3.1GHz, Laptop Computers with Touch ID, WiFi, BT4.2, for Students/Business

Name rolls off the tongue doesn’t it

There is a startup whose product is better search. The killer feature is that you pay for it, so you aren't the produdct. https://kagi.com/welcome

I've been slowly detaching myself from the web for the past 10 years. These days I mostly build offline apps using native technologies. Those capabilities are still around. They just receded for a while because they'd gotten so polluted with toolbars and malware. But now the malware is on the other side, and native apps are cool again. If you know where to look. Here's my shingle: https://akkartik.name/freewheeling-apps

On the other hand, what you call "The Web" seems to be just what you can get at through search engines. There's still the old web, the thing that's mediated by relationships and reputation rather than aggregation services with billions of users. Like the link I shared above. Or this heroically moderated site we're using right now.

> If I can in any way purchase something without the web, I'mma do that

To get to the milk you'll have to walk by 3 rows of chips and soda.

> Their old website was plain and worked great, letting me quickly search through their products and quickly purchase them. Last night I literally struggled to add things to cart and check out; it was actually harrowing.

Hey, who cares about making services that work when we can give people a cool chatbot assistant and a 1800 number with no real-person alternative to the decision tree

The web is much more than a shopping site.

I suppose it is just Amazon problems. I have never lived in the area where Amazon is prevalent. Where I live, search engines still can't find synonyms or process misspellings.

If search is your metric, the web was dead long before OpenAI's release of GPT. I gave up on web search a long time ago.

for tech stuff I just use documentation, bug trackers and source code now. Web searching has become useless.