Amazon Plans To Add ChatGPT-Style Search To Its Online Store

Amazon plans to bring ChatGPT-style product search to its web store, rivaling efforts by Microsoft and Google to weave generative artificial intelligence into their search engines. From a report: The e-commerce giant's ambitions appear in recent job postings reviewed by Bloomberg News. One listing seeking a senior software development engineer says the company is "reimagining Amazon Search with an interactive conversational experience" designed to help users find answers to questions, compare products and receive personalized suggestions. "We're looking for the best and brightest across Amazon to help us realize and deliver this vision to our customers right away," the company said in the listing, which was posted on its jobs board last month. "This will be a once in a generation transformation for Search." Another posted job would be part of "a new AI-first initiative to re-architect and reinvent the way we do search through the use of extremely large scale next-generation deep learning techniques."

Re:

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Ignore it mate, it's now standard /. clickbait.

OTOH Amazon is now just endless, fucking endless adverts, can an AI make it any worse?

Re:Can we stop with the ChatGPT style crap?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

That's just it, AI if done properly would kill their ad business. Their search used to work great, but merchants were getting to the top of the results just by creating good products at low prices that customers wanted, which didn't earn any ad revenue from merchants. So ads had to be added, so you could pay money to be at the top regardless of cost or ratings or relevancy, or lie at the bottom of the first page for just having a good product people wanted to buy.

How on earth are they going to give me the results I want while still making ad revenue from merchants? They can't even stop review abuse.

Re:

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I mean, yes that's a troll, but also like a metaphor for amazon search. It is an online casino for merchants. Worried about your search rankings? Don't worry for a low low "insurance" payment we can provide some "protection" for your legs I mean store. So that they remain unbroken and money continues to flow to us through you, I mean we don't want some vandal taking your search result. What money you don't make in revenue based on ad spend, we'll more than make up for it through exposure.

Great!

[oldgraybeard]

I want to use Amazon less for shopping anyway!

Re:

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Stopped using it for shopping when it suggested hair loss cream when I was looking for a new monitor.

Re: Great!

[Provocateur]

Were you looking at your reflection on the monitor as you conducted your search? Not to worry, the over-the-screen webcam had its eye on you the whole time

Re:Great!

[Deep Esophagus]

As much as I loathe ChatGPT and its hallucinations, I loathe Amazon's search interface even more. No reliable, consistent way to limit your search to a specific category e.g. car parts and not just books about cars; no reliable, consistent way to limit your search to price range, size, color, functionality, etc. You used to be able to filter on vendor location, but too much of their crap comes from China so they don't let you do that anymore.

I usually end up using eBay's superior search filters to identify the product I want, then go back to Amazon to find the best price.

So, ChatGPT can't make it any worse at least and might even make it better.

Re:

[test321]

While AI hallucinations are involuntary that OpenAI/etc are working on to eliminate, Amazon search was entirely designed to the perfection you can see. Its purpose is to show you items that sellers PAID amazon to have listed this way, or stuff they need to sell quickly.

I personally use google to find pages it indexes from amazon so I get product names, then look up the product name on the internet to find shops I trust.

Amazon Search

[jsonn]

Amazon has one of the worst catalog search systems on the market. It's absolutely amazing how bad it is compared to sites that Amazon made defunc. It can only get better...

Re:Amazon Search

[Major_Disorder]

Amazon has one of the worst catalog search systems on the market. It's absolutely amazing how bad it is compared to sites that Amazon made defunc. It can only get better...

I love how when you search for something, and it finds pages of results. So you tell it to sort by price and suddenly there are less than half as many results, or no results at all.

Re:

[jsonn]

That's one of the few things that are easy to explain and kind of state of the art. What's obnoxious (and something ML can actually improve) is that they seemingly have no detection of size units in the search term and unlike other catalog systems, don't seem to record it properly either. E.g. try to look for a SSD of a specific size - it just doesn't work like that.

Re:

[Finallyjoined!!!]

In English that would be what exactly

Re:

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

That terrible search engine that Amazon has...is on purpose

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Amazon is basically AliExpress but with a domestic markup. The same shit with a bad search and shipping that ranges from one day to one month.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[cmdr_klarg]

From what I can tell, their search algorithm must use an OR operator instead of an AND. An actual useful search would help narrow the search for 14x20 inch MERV 13 furnace filters to NOT include 20x25 filters or MERV 10's.

I'm sure their flavor of chatgpt will be soooo much more useful...

Re:

[sinij]

Amazon has one of the worst catalog search systems on the market.

It is not "the worst" if you account that its main goal is to generate most profit for Amazon, which often is not congruent with you finding what you are looking for.

Re:

[Burdell]

That's on purpose. Amazon's "search engine" is designed to maximize profits for Amazon and (as a very distant second goal) their suppliers. Getting you to buy things you weren't actually looking for is an important part of that job; they don't have traditional "front door" and "end cap" displays and such to accomplish that task, so the next best thing is littering the search results with things that they think they might can get you to buy.

Re:

[awwshit]

> It can only get better...

Naw, I do not need another way for Amazon to only show me brands like COOLFANDY or ROOFULL or ectju. Pages and pages and pages of cheap Chinese junk, nothing else to be found. Want to find a brand you've heard of, better type that name directly and then skip to page 4 of the results.

There is no way I want to type more words to get the same shit results. I mean with the brands its going to return, the Amazon AI is going to be spitting gibberish.

Hype Hype Lemonade

[KlomDark]

Round the corner, AI is made...

Enough with this silly bandwagon.

Can it filter the Unsafe stuff

[Dusanyu]

If I can ask it to filter out the 300 Pages of repeated listings terribly made low quality garbage I am all for it Shop bicycle Parts some time you have to go threw pages and pages of unsafe things until you get to anything good https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

Just what I needed...

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Something to make the shopping experience longer and more unpleasant. Heaven forbid I just search for what I want and buy it. Now I have to chat with a robot.

But first...

[Yo,dog!]

First, amazon needs to provide good support for basic search terms.

Will it finally give non-demented recommendations?

[gweihir]

I mean, I have removed all "urban lit-RPG dungeon/dragon/vampire/whatever harem" crap I get recommended for ages and it still thinks it should offer me more...

Put slightly differently:

[Kevoco]

Amazon's already terrible search is about to get much MUCH worse

LOL

[RitchCraft]

Amazon search does not work now! I'm truly dumbfounded that they have a found a way to make it worse.

will know way too much

[ZipNada]

I definitely can see Amazon and other retailers hopping onto this, and it is disturbing. The amount of personal info the shopping portals can get about you is already very extensive. All your previous interactions of course, but in principle they could also have scraped your social history as a background task. They could do a data-sharing deal where they get access to your entire purchase history. They can know what you own and how much you earn and owe.

Handing all that over to a powerful generative AI tha

Maybe we'll actually be able to find things

[Tony Isaac]

Amazon search is terrible. Try searching for a 3-foot extension cord. Good luck with that. Or anything with a specific size or characteristic. The filters aren't much better. Give it a price range, and it still includes items that are higher priced, but some seller is selling used for the price in your range. Or they include things that are unavailable. One can only hope that this new search will work better, but I'm not all that optimistic.

Could be worse.

[presearch]

Could be crypto.

Maybe ChatGPT will fix Amazon's crappy search.

[bjwest]

No matter what I search for, Amazon search shows me, maybe, one or two items that match, all the others are just crap of different size, color, or even something entirely different.

idiocy

[groobly]

That is the opposite of what is needed. It's like replacing a spec sheet with a used car salesman.

Amazon search is currently crap because it fails to take into account the very well defined spec parameters of any product category. It is just a simple matter of database search if you have adequate data. Right now their pos search can't even sort by price or color or filter by usb level.