I don't work at Amazon but worked at one of the largest comparison shopping sites in a core search group.
Sorting by price is hard - if you really wanted to do a true price sort you end up with the long tail of products that match the term "ipod" (but are very loosely related to ipods) at the top of search results. Try searching for ipod in electronics and sorting by price.:
I get a usb connector, stereo speaker, some other mp3 players, etc. all among the top 6 results. Only 2 ipods on the first page. At least there is a link to a department containing just the ipods.
So in order to avoid doing really badly you don't allow searching by pure price, but rather use a combination of price and relevancy (and this can only take you so far as the results above demonstrate.)
Ideally, you would click electronics category. Apple. IPod. Order by price. You didn't select category iPod accessories, so you shouldn't see them there
But some slob at Amazon sacrificed search by adding related crap
Comments
I don't work at Amazon but worked at one of the largest comparison shopping sites in a core search group.
Sorting by price is hard - if you really wanted to do a true price sort you end up with the long tail of products that match the term "ipod" (but are very loosely related to ipods) at the top of search results. Try searching for ipod in electronics and sorting by price.:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_i_0?rh=k%3Aipod%2C...
I get a usb connector, stereo speaker, some other mp3 players, etc. all among the top 6 results. Only 2 ipods on the first page. At least there is a link to a department containing just the ipods.
So in order to avoid doing really badly you don't allow searching by pure price, but rather use a combination of price and relevancy (and this can only take you so far as the results above demonstrate.)
There's no excuse like that for Amazon.
Ideally, you would click electronics category. Apple. IPod. Order by price. You didn't select category iPod accessories, so you shouldn't see them there
But some slob at Amazon sacrificed search by adding related crap