Toolstation's search facility

somebody already has

is it impossible that they monitor what people search for and what they then buy and have thus found that a lot of people search for putty but actually want a filler?

and typing "linseed" into their search box would have shown you the 2 sizes of linseed oil putty they sell without you even pressing Enter

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

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".

Yep, I'm pretty sure this is how Amazon works - all this 'Amazon's choice' stuff for things that don't contain the terms you searched for, and all being extremely dubious no-brand things that you can buy identical versions of on Aliexpress for a third the price.

Although the infamous B&Q search facility was I think just incompetence. It seems to have got better of late.

Theo

Have you ever put cassette player into Amazons search engine? You get cd players and batteries merely because some bright spark has use the word cassette in the description, like Suitable for high current devices like cd and cassette portable devices in the case of batteries. Brian

When I put "cassette player" with the double quotes into amazon, in the first 5 pages the only items I see that are not capable of playing cassettes are some replacement drive belts and one of those adapters to play music from a phone through a car stereo.

I wanted solvent-based brick sealer and got pages and pages of silicone sealant.

Luckily Google found "Bostic Cementone brick sealer" and it was out of stock online and only one 5 litre can left in the south of england in Leatherhead, so I drove there and grabbed it. I think VOC2010 or whatever has consigned it to history. IKO used to make a similar product, and Wilco used to sell it but that too has disappeared.

They've got plenty in Wickes an Travis Perkins, rather than ToolSatan (obviously they're essentially the same mob)

Hmm. £24 in Wickes, only £13.98 in Toolstation. Both part of TP (for now, Wickes is/was up for sale). Google showed Toolstation so that's where I went.

Toolstation website says 'not available online' and trying various postcodes around southern UK says branch out-of-stock, so maybe I have got the last can. Maybe they were dropping it hence the cheap price ?. The similar IKO sealant I bought in Wilco about 10 years ago was £25 for 5 litres even then.

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.

Couldn't agree more.

Etsy have started to stuff so many advertising entries you just give up.

Sites which use multiple spellings (colour and color) - but their search only finds one spelling can drive you mad.

Sites like CPC which, except for mistakes, accurately search are so much better to use. One of the very best is