On 16 Oct 2020 at 19:29:48 BST, "Adrian Caspersz" wrote:

On 16/10/2020 16:53, Andy Burns wrote:

Murmansk wrote:

I wanted some linseed oil putty - I put "putty" in the search box
and got three pages of results,Â* more than fifty items, only one of
which (item 25Â* I think) was putty!

They need to get someone who has some idea how to code to sort their
website out


somebody already has

https://google.com/search?q=linseed+putty+site:toolstation.com

Ye could argue that poor targeted search engines on supplier websites
are deliberate, so that you get tempted to buy other items when they are
"accidently" waved in front of ya face - Supermarket stylee.

Also, I say "accidently" in quotes, as they may well be using SEO
tricks, cookies and dodgy relations with unknowns - and so may know
*exactly* what they are doing, even though it's unhelpful and looks broken.

For a while, the folks that ran Maplin's website, successfully spammed
Google. I would search for something, get guided to the Maplin site, and
then find the specific item something that they have long sold out of,
so met with "item not found".

--
Adrian C

My impression is that many websites use an inclusive 'or' for search terms, so
that the more terms you enter the more results you get. This could just be a
very simple search method, but I wondered whether this was actually what naive
search users expect? Obviously, the only way to use such a search is to
serially try searches with single terms, trying to guess which term is most
likely to be unique to the item you want. Not very efficient.

--
Roger Hayter