My _favourite_ part of searching on AliExpress is that, when you’re logged in, 90% of any search results have nothing to do with, you know, the search query, and are just (related to) products you’ve previously looked at. Why?!?
It never makes sense to intentionally return inapplicable search results. Think about it: product search is the ultimate advertising opportunity. A customer with money to spend is proactively telling you exactly what they want to spend it on. And you're going to go out of your way to piss this customer off?!
Bold strategy, Jeff, let's see how it works out for you.
Inapplicable to whom?
> product search is the ultimate advertising opportunity
To me, this is what lends confidence to the idea that the results are hardly "inapplicable". The results may be quite applicable from Amazon's perspective.
This is just a guess, but it seems unlikely that all Amazon cares about is returning the exact perfect set of results that lead you directly to what you're intending to purchase. They may know that showing seemingly random results increases impulse sales of high profit items they have in local "get it today" warehouses. Or they know that people who search for the thing you searched for are n times more likely to buy Product X impulsively, but only if they show it to you on the first Monday morning of the month.
Or maybe they've lost their minds, and have tried to optimize and maximize profits from their recommendations that they're blind to much simpler approaches.
Then there's the business of repeating the same search in a private browsing window and getting substantially different results. Another great way to flush business down the drain.