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Previous: Bad gadgets | Main | Next: Food label ingredient listing
November 23, 2005 12:03 AM
Broken: Walmart website search engine
Joseph Mori writes in:
While trying to find a raincoat for my wife I decided to give Walmart a try.
Instead of wading through the thousands of items they have, I figured a search could narrow down my selection.
I asked for a "long raincoat" under apparel but check out what the search found.
It does seem odd that it only returned 4 CDs. There are a lot more with those 2 words at walmart.com.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awalmart.com+long+raincoat
What is really broken of course is that you were considering walmart for your purchase.
Mall Wart- Your home for cheap plastic crap.
perhaps te search engine needs an old guy to say "hello" to you
At quick glance, the term raincoat is part of a song title on the CD - so a fairly good/deep site search engine.
Also, if you choose the "apparel" dept to narrow your search, you would get a message that tells you that they don't sell raincoats online...but here are our matches in other departments.
Seems like fairly smart business.
Actually, I am amazed at all of you that noone as of yet noticed the search engine did not produce what I was certain it would of with the request made... "other" than average sized condoms.
Um... Just a note...
Joseph did not search in apparel. Look at the screen shot. His search was of the entire site. Not broken.
Actually he probably did search in apparel, after you search it goes back to search Entire Site, probably to encourage you to use that if you didn't find what you were looking for.
Chaos: way to accept mediocrity. It's people like you that gave us market dominance of Windows.
"Raincoat" will probably mean, literally, a raincoat 99% of the time on WalMart's site. Commercial search engines should be smarter than this.
To all those who shop at wal-mart or even think about shopping there, you are supporting an evil corporation that helps to set minimum wage standards to keep poor people poor, and they are also responsible for exploiting child labor overseas and they help to infringe on our constitutional ammendments. Everything about wal-mart is broken so its website is technically not broken because it is only a part of a larger broken whole, and it only makes sense that the broken whole would require that all of its parts be broken, so for wal-mart their website works with the larger company structure-
Broken. I tried typing in other random stuff, like basketball and socks, and the site seems to give some strange preference to CD's and books. So, yeah, it's a remarkably deep search engine, but shouldn't it give listing preference to an actual RAINCOAT instead any word in the item description? Who in God's name would search for The Best of Rod Stewart by typing in the word raincoat?
I've tried WalMart's search before and it is the worst I've ever seen. It never produces results that are even remotely relevant.
It's not broken because something that is broken had to have worked once.
Smartypants, couldn't the same be said for almost EVERY large corporation in the U.S.? That's usually how they get to BE large corporations, if I'm not mistaken...
Yeah, yeah, screw the EVIL corporations.
I say we stop shopping at WalMart, and buying gas, and deodorant, and toothpaste and soap...yeah.
And after that...
I want all you stinky bastards to stay home and away from me.
Oh wait, you won't have gas in your car anyway.
Score.
HA!
puff
*I just tried it. It stays the same for me.*
Well aren't you just a lucky ducky? It didn't stay the same for me.
Regardless of whether Walmart is evil or not, the results from the search engine don't match very well with the common expectation of what would be returned. This undermines the confidence of the consumer in using the search engine to look for products on the site.
Heck, IMO, any search engine that returns Leonard Cohen when it can't find what you're looking for is less broken than most...
Actually most of the commercial sites have freaky search engines. Try kmart, target, best buy, whatever.
Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld, so I can sigh eternally,... while wearing my snappy, styish, hip, cool, all weather raincoat, available at your local Walmart.
FYI: The Rod Stewart CDs are listed because they include the song "An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down." The Leonard Cohen albums feature his classic "Famous Blue Raincoat."
I agree with Smartypants. The whole store is broken. The search engine is probably more helpful then the Anines that work there. If I had a dollar for every time someone said it wasn't their department then walked away.
Only a week after our local store was opened the damn separater sticks on every aisle has come up missing. I think it's Wally's conspiracy to sell you more shtuff... sh** you didn't want. I always leave that store with things I didn't put in my cart or missing items because of this. I've gotten dog food, but have no dog. Window blinds, and live in the country where I can run around naked with the windows wide open, and my favorite a pregnancy test when I can't get pregnant. Try to go back and get the items your weren't given... what a laugh. You spend besides the trip back about another 30 minutes waiting in line and explaining yourself and leaving the store feeling like the gals at the counter think you were trying to get something for free.
I also hate how they don't sell a bunch of things a major competitor does because they say "space prevents us from doing so" but yet they have batteries everywhere and soap in 2 departments.
Also broken: the $80 compact flash card on a theft proof hook but the $150 card isn't and is on the next peg! Again... no help. Left store and went to competitor, got the same card for $30 less and with less plastic packaging.
I now shop at the competitor which is about 2 miles further from me and I pass Wally's to get there.
Walmart=broken
Mark Anderson:
>I say we stop shopping at WalMart, and buying gas, and deodorant, and toothpaste and soap...yeah.
>And after that...
>I want all you stinky bastards to stay home and away from me.
Wow. You just described France.
You just have to know how these things work. I searched for 'Rod Stewart Greatest Hits, and the first item was a raincoat. Stay away from any store that has the word 'Mart' in it.
Smartypants-
Of the Groucho variety, right?
Steve-
Awesome.
Personally, I think there's a big cognitive dissonance if you're thinking raincoat and you get CDs (and you can't tell from the results that they contain tracks with the word "raincoat" in the name). I think most people would assume that Wal*Mart has raincoats, so their website should, too.
So, not broken per se, but certainly not well-oiled, shiny, and fast.
They must have changed the site, I searched and got this response:
"We did not find any matches for “raincoat ” in the department you searched, but we did find the following matches elsewhere."
I prefer when a search gives me unexpected results. I often search for vague information and the obvious choices don't always lead to the best path.
HOWEVER, man are you guys right! That search engine is horrible! I took keywords from a description of one item and did a search. Came up with one result and it wasn't the item that I was copying from.
That's when the Google "search site" feature comes in handy...
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Previous: Bad gadgets | Main | Next: Food label ingredient listing
Maybe she wants those instead... Wal-Mart knows best.
Posted by: Tim at November 23, 2005 12:31 AM