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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

This feels like a big missing piece at this stage of AIs evolution. I just searched on Amazon for five inch chair casters. They used to have them but don't anymore. But that took me a long time to find out. Instead it just dumped all of the chair casters and let me read the details to find out the hard way that none of them were what I wanted across 10 pages of results. But I've been spoiled by modern chatbots. I want it to read the product copy and figure it out, and just tell me "We don't have any of those. But here are some others you might like..."

It seems inevitable that search boxes will become for prompts rather than just keywords, and become conversational and include the context of previous searches.

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> This feels like a big missing piece at this stage of AIs evolution. I just searched on Amazon for five inch chair casters. They used to have them but don't anymore. But that took me a long time to find out. Instead it just dumped all of the chair casters and let me read the details to find out the hard way that none of them were what I wanted across 10 pages of results. But I've been spoiled by modern chatbots. I want it to read the product copy and figure it out, and just tell me "We don't have any of those. But here are some others you might like..."

Why would a company want to provide this? Modern-day Amazon doesn't win when you find out that what you want isn't there; they "win" when their search is so bad that you spend a long time browsing counterfeit or not-quite-there results that you might buy. The future of an Amazon-designed chatbot that I see would be for it to try actively to snowball me into buying an inappropriate product, not to help me quickly discover that what I want isn't there.

Have you seen Miracle on 34th Street, where Kris Kringle convinces Macy's and Gimbels to tell their customers that their competition has what they're looking for? That isn't as fictional as Santa Claus. I was in a Walmart yesterday when I heard a clerk tell a customer that the hardware store down the street has the thing that Walmart didn't. It happens a bazillion times a day.

> Have you seen Miracle on 34th Street, where Kris Kringle convinces Macy's and Gimbels to tell their customers that their competition has what they're looking for? That isn't as fictional as Santa Claus. I was in a Walmart yesterday when I heard a clerk tell a customer that the hardware store down the street has the thing that Walmart didn't. It happens a bazillion times a day.

One of my favorite movies, yes! And I absolutely believe that a clerk will do this; if there was ever a loyalty of staff to the retail companies for which they worked, it was probably misplaced then, and is definitely misplaced now. But that's a matter of human discretion that overseers haven't yet been able to engineer out, whereas here we're talking about something that would have specifically to engineer in. The unwillingness of Amazon even to try to confront the massive review-gaming and counterfeit-items problem leads me to believe that, to the extent that they ever viewed their mission as getting the customer what they wanted, they don't now—and so will not change their search in a way that would facilitate that.

i’m not sure if i like contextual search. a profile of me is ripe for exploitation and sale

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