Yesterday, I got an email with a link to a survey over your search function. I went to click on it...and it took me to a page that told me to get my mobile device. That I would need to search on my phone. And use that, and the results from it for the survey. Like I would do if I were shopping.
Y'all have made some assumptions, here. You do know what they say about assumptions, right?
I didn't take the survey, because I do not use my phone to shop. I don't use it to browse the internet. I don't use it to play games. I don't use it for day-to-day anything. My phone is a safety device, not a leash, and definitely not something I can't do without. In fact, half the time, I forget to make sure the damn thing is charged.
That said. I have a lot of friends who have taken your survey. And they, and I, have complaints about your search function.
First, the haystack. Sure, you've got an enormous haystack to search through. Biggest in the world. Most types of hay...only, you've got a problem. We aren't looking for hay. We're looking for a needle.
That's right. Your search dumps thousands upon thousands of results on us...mostly unrelated to that thing we're actually searching for.
That tells me that a) your coders and other employees are utterly incompetent at the jobs you've hired them for, which is a waste of your time and money, or b) you're wasting my time, hoping to get more of my money.
That's...not the way it works. You waste my time, you don't get any more of my money. I'll take it and go somewhere that the search function isn't broken. Or at least, not broken as badly.
Which leads me to my next complaint: you done fucked up the Boolean searches. I remember using them. "And" narrowed the search down. "Or" expanded it. "Not" filtered out the things that were almost right, but not what I was looking for.
I used those all the way through grad school, doing keyword searches through literally billions of words in articles, in millions of articles, in hundreds of thousands of subjects for the fifty or so journals that might have the dozen or so sources I needed for my research papers. It worked there. It should work in your shopping site.
It should work especially well in doing searches for Kindle reading.
But it doesn't. I don't know why, but y'all done fucked that up long before you fucked up everything else.
Here's the thing: I already subscribe to Kindle Unlimited. I buy a lot of books otherwise, too. I have preferences, and those preferences do not include the kind of crap your searches show, and I can't narrow the searches down to find the things I do want to read.
So, instead of reading new things, I re-read the old. Even when I'd rather have something new, I simply can't find anything. Because you fucked up the search functions for it. I'd love to give you more money (I'd love to have more--I'm pretty sure my books would show up in more searches for people who'd enjoy reading what I write if your search wasn't broken), but I don't buy things just because you shove them in my face. Hell, I won't even borrow things just because you shove them in my face. I don't like the sort of things you shove in my face; I'm sure as fuck not wasting my limited time and money on them.
Please. Fix the search function. Make it actually, y'know, functional.
And then? Then, we'll be spending a whole lot more of our disposable income. We could even have more disposable income.
Thanks,
A dissatisfied customer
