Bug or Feature, Amazon?

Bug or Feature, Amazon?

After so many years in consumer web, it's hard not to notice the little things. I found one this morning that's fun to 'reverse engineer' what Amazon's intent is with different search results.

Default search ranking with sort by 'featured' returns 50 results:

Slight modification of sort by price high to low returns 34 results:

Okay, maybe price isn't well defined for all items and they should be excluded. Let's sort by price low to high ..... 17 results!

This is too much! Bug or feature? Is Amazon being devilishly clever and filtering results based on presumed user personas, over inflating results with low quality products until forced to exclude them on basic criteria, or in the wake of intern season has a candidate generation call been corrupted?

And if you were curious Billy Reid was the designer of that iconic James Bond peacoat in Skyfall.

Maybe it’s because of precision and recall in their search engine. I think if you repeat your search, the results maybe different again.

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